Rate My Professor Joseph Sollini

Dr Joseph Sollini is an Assistant Professor in the School of Medicine and a Nottingham Research Fellow in Hearing Sciences at the University of Nottingham, within the Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences. He received his PhD in Biomedical Science from the University of Nottingham in 2013, demonstrating that auditory spatial information is transformed along ascending auditory pathways. In the same year, he joined Dr Paul Chaderton's Neural Circuits lab at Imperial College London, where he used optogenetics to show the importance of auditory cortex in learning sound statistics. He then moved to Prof Jenny Bizley's lab at University College London, developing an animal behavioural paradigm to probe neural circuits of speech processing in noise. In 2020, he was awarded a prestigious Nottingham Research Fellowship, allowing him to establish his own neural circuits lab at Nottingham, applying opto- and chemogenetics to investigate hearing-in-noise.

Sollini's research specializes in auditory neuroscience, systems neuroscience, and optogenetics, with a focus on neural circuits underlying the ability to extract signals from noise and the effects of aging and hearing loss on these processes. He leads projects such as reversing neural consequences of hearing loss to restore hearing-in-noise sensitivity, funded by a £125k Academy of Medical Sciences Springboard Award; examining whether the hippocampus supports hearing in predictable background sounds, funded by £100k from the Medical Research Foundation; and measuring inhibitory deficits in people with tinnitus, funded by £85k from the Silvia Whitby Fund. His key publications include 'Mammalian behavior and physiology converge to confirm sharper cochlear tuning in humans' (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2018), 'ON-OFF receptive fields in auditory cortex diverge during development and contribute to directional sweep selectivity' (Nature Communications, 2018), 'Spatial processing is frequency specific in auditory cortex but not in the midbrain' (Journal of Neuroscience, 2017), and 'Comodulation enhances signal detection via priming of auditory cortical circuits' (Journal of Neuroscience, 2016). These works have advanced understanding of auditory processing mechanisms and their disruptions in hearing disorders.