Dr. Suga has led discoveries in the neurophysiology of hearing through research on bat echolocation. Elected a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences in 1998, Nobuo Suga, Ph.D., professor of biology at Washington University, has been honored for his ground-breaking work in bat hearing that has major implications for people suffering from stroke or brain damage.

For three decades Dr. Suga and his colleagues have studied the auditory system of bats, which is highly developed to guide the night-flying mammals. Their investigations have targeted the complex neural mechanisms used in echo- location: bats send out sound signals then interpret the reverberating echoes to navigate, locate food and communicate among themselves. Dr. Suga has applied the analysis of the bats central auditory systems to understand the process in other mammals, including humans. He showed, among other things, the similarity between the bats auditory system and the mammalian visual system.

His recent studies have broken new ground to show that the auditory system of the brain can adapt in response to stimuli and associative learning, termed plasticity. The Suga team has found that in bats, auditory information moves from the inner ear to the cerebral cortex at the top of the brain. Feedback loops are formed as signals come down from the cerebral cortex to the inner ear. Dr. Suga has opened new avenues regarding the mechanisms by which sounds are encoded by specific cells in specific brain areas. More recently, his lab has shown that sensory stimulation causes feedback from the cortex to the lower brain structures.