Research Overview

Over the past three decades, the Coleman Memorial Laboratory has focused its research initiatives on the search for the physiological and anatomical principles of brain organization that are the bases for how hearing sensation is established, transformed and learned.  From those principles, a series of ground-breaking treatments for hearing loss and related neurological disorders of language, cognition, and movement control have been developed.  The laboratory continues to pioneer novel techniques to explore the causes and central nervous consequences of hearing loss and to restoring hearing in deafness. It has also broadened the scope of projects to include the development of perceptual training strategies designed to overcome impairments in hearing, in communication, in cognitive abilities, and in fluent motor control of speech and body movement in children with language impairments, in dyslexic children, in autistic syndrome children, in aging populations with and without significant hearing loss, in aphasic and other hearing- and communication-related stroke patients, and in patients with acquired motor deficits, such as spasmodic dysphonia, surgically-induced aphonia, or more general focal dystonias.

Over the last quarter-century epoch, scientists of the Coleman Memorial Laboratory have published more than 500 scientific papers, and have been awarded the rights to more than 50 U.S. and many international patents.  Members of its research team have received numerous prizes and honors.  Nearly a half million hearing-, language- and reading impaired children and adults have benefited from new hearing substitution devices and neuroscience-based remedial training strategies developed in our laboratories.  New strategies now in development for improving the listening and cognitive abilities of hearing aid users and of aging individuals shall almost certainly be applied to millions of other individuals in great need of help.  The practical inventions that have come from this group already represent two of the top 20 sets of inventions now licensed by the entire University of California system.  Three new companies (Advanced Bionics, Sylmar CA; Scientific Learning Corporation, Oakland, CA; Posit Science Corporation, San Francisco, CA) have been established on the basis of these inventions.  The Department’s group of dedicated scientists is recognized nationally and internationally as leaders in their research and academic medicine subdiscipline.  Collaborative associations link our scientists with scientists and clinicians in top research groups at research institutions in Germany, Great Britain, Japan, China, Chile and Finland, and with scientists at Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC San Diego, and MIT.

 Our main objective for research development in UCSF Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery is to further elaborate, and to insure the continuity of this powerful basic research and translational research capability, addressing additional areas of human communication that have long been neglected, while sustaining a continuing, sharp focus on driving research findings from the laboratory out into the world to help people in need.