Troy A. Hackett, PhD

Troy Hackett has devoted his entire career to research and clinical work in the auditory system. After 5 years of clinical practice in audiology and completion of a PhD in hearing science, Dr. Hackett began full-time research and teaching in the Dept. of Hearing and Speech Sciences at the Vanderbilt Bill Wilkerson Center. A major goal and accomplishment of this research program has been to build testable “gold-standard” models of central auditory organization from studies in humans, nonhuman primates, and other animal models. Anatomical, neurophysiological, and genomic techniques are combined to characterize the structural and functional changes associated with development, hearing loss, and aging. These techniques include: 1) architectonic and chemoarchitectonic profiles of brain areas; 2) gene and protein expression profiles of neuronal and glial subtypes in specific areas and pathways; 3) identification of cell-type-specific connections and pathways between brain areas; and 4) neurophysiology and behavior. In collaborative projects, these methods have been applied to studies of multisensory networks, cholinergic circuitry, and alterations of auditory-related circuits in development, aging, substance addiction and 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. Dr. Hackett is also a co-director of the NIH/NIDCD Human Temporal Bone Initiative, which supports three affiliated programs that advance human inner ear research through a nationwide network of tissue donations, research laboratories, and a centralized data repository (EarBase).