Jinsheng Zhang: Curing ringing in the ears

Professor Zhang received a Ph.D. in auditory neurophysiology at University of Fribourg in Switzerland in 1997. He is a tenured full Professor in the Department of Otolaryngology, School of Medicine and the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Wayne State University.

He is the vice-chair for research and research director of the Department of Otolaryngology at Wayne State University. His tinnitus research career started in 1997, with interests encompassing neural mechanisms underlying noise- and blast-induced tinnitus and mild traumatic brain injury and their neuromodulation (acoustic, electrical, pharmacological and optogenetic).

During Ph.D. training with Professor Eric Rouiller (1994-1997), he characterized neural activation along the rat auditory pathways following cochlear electrical stimulation. During postdoctoral training with Professor James Kaltenbach (1997-2000), he studied noise-induced hyperactivity in the dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN) and other centers and their relationship to tinnitus.

Since then, he has developed multi-structural recordings from both auditory and non-auditory centers for investigation of how neural network within and across different centers contributes to tinnitus. Recently he demonstrated that auditory cortex electrical stimulation suppresses tinnitus and that DCN electrical stimulation not only suppresses tinnitus but also induces hearing in a rat model.

He is now investigating how cochlear stimulation suppresses tinnitus. He aims to understand how bottom-up and peripheral modulation suppresses tinnitus compared to top-down and central modulation. His eventual goal is, through working with engineers and clinicians, to develop effective treatments for tinnitus.