Dr. Hudspeth Biography

Dr. Hudspeth grew up in the rural outskirts of Houston, Texas where he has said that his interest in science and nature flourished. He was a passionate collector of rocks, fossils, and shells along with a variety of animals. Hudspeth started his first research job at the age of 13 working with Dr. Peter Kellaway, who was a neurophysiologist at the Baylor College of Medicine. Dr. Hudspeth’s passion for hearing was sparked while pursuing a Ph.D at Harvard. He states that the his interest was sparked when assigned to give a lecture on the topic to medical students. He says “I was struck that so little was known – especially in modern, cell-biological terms- about the operation of a sense as important as hearing.” This caused him to research the topic in the lab. The first major hurdle that Dr. Hudspeth had to overcome was devising a way to study study hair cells effectively since they were inside the skulls of living animals. He soon devised a method of havesting cells from bullfrogs, whose ears are bundles on the outside of their skull. This work taught him that each bundle can be …show more content…
Hudspeth received a Bachelors of Arts in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard College in 1967. From there he receive a Masters and later a Ph.D in Neurobiology from Harvard University. He also obtained his M.D. from Harvard Medical School. He did his post-doctoral work at Harvard Medical School and also Karolinska Institute. During his time at Harvard, Dr. Hudspeth worked with later Nobel Prize winners Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel who won prizes for their work in ocular dominance columns and also for estblishing the foundation for visual neurophysiology. From there, Dr. Hudspeth was a professor at California Institute of Technology, the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, and finally is a professor at Rockefeller University. He also has been an investigator at Howard Hughest Medical Institute for over 20