Graduate students win support for research on deafness

Graduate students win support for research on deafness

BY JADE BOYD
Rice News staff

This year bioengineering graduate student Louise Organ, a fourth-year student in the laboratory of Robert Raphael, became the second of Raphael’s students to win independent grant support from the National Institutes of Health.

Louise Organ

Organ was awarded a National Research Service Award from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders. The award, a Predoctoral Ruth L. Kirschstein Fellowship, includes two-and-a-half years of funding.

Organ is the second of Raphael’s students to receive a Kirschstein Fellowship in the past two years. The other, Jenni Greeson, won the award last year for a proposal to apply advanced optical imaging techniques to study the mechanical and biophysical properties of the protein prestin.

“The Kirschstein fellowships are very competitive,” said Raphael, the T.N. Law Assistant Professor in Bioengineering. “Jenni and Louise are well-deserving of these awards. They are organized, focused and independent students. I call them the ‘dynamic duo.’ Their complementary research is already leading us to a greater understanding of nature’s most unique molecular motor. The bioengineering graduate program [at Rice] is fortunate to attract students of such high caliber.”

Organ’s research also involves prestin. The protein, which is found in outer hair cells of the inner ear, converts electrical signals into physical motion, allowing the outer hair cells to act as biological audio amplifiers. Organ hopes to understand how changes in the structural properties of outer hair cell membranes affect the performance of prestin. The research could help answer questions about why certain drugs, like aspirin, can cause temporary deafness, and may help scientists identify new classes of drugs that could allow some deaf people to hear for the very first time.

Moreover, understanding how prestin operates lays the foundation for potential applications in bionanotechnology.

“The larger environment at Rice and the Texas Medical Center provides an ideal setting to carry out this research,” Raphael said.