Robert Fettiplace, PhD

Biography

Dr. Fettiplace studied at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, obtaining a BA in medical sciences and a PhD in biophysics, then joined Denis Baylor at Stanford University for postdoctoral work on turtle photoreceptors. In 1976, he returned to Cambridge University and continued research on turtles but switched to studying auditory transduction. With Andrew Crawford, he described the sensitivity and frequency tuning of auditory hair cells and discovered that individual turtle hair cells were electrically tuned to specific frequencies arranged along the cochlea like keys of a piano. He and Jon Art showed that a hair cell's electrical tuning frequency is determined by the number and kinetics of its Ca2+-activated K+ (BK) channels, implying that distinct kinetic forms of the BK channel encode different frequencies. He first used photodiode imaging to track the nanometer motion of hair bundles, enabling description of their mechanical properties and spontaneous oscillations. In 1990, Dr. Fettiplace became the Steenbock Professor of Neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he researched the properties and location of the mechanically sensitive ion channels underlying sound transduction. His research culminated in providing evidence for the contribution of the transmembrane channel-like protein, TMC1, as the mechano-transducer channel in mammalian cochlear hair cells. Dr. Fettiplace is a Fellow of the

Royal Society of London and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2018 he shared the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience with A. James Hudspeth and Christine Petit.

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