Rate My Professor Shaowen Bao

Shaowen Bao, PhD, is Professor of Physiology, Professor of Neuroscience Graduate Interdisciplinary Program (GIDP), and Professor of Physiological Sciences GIDP at the University of Arizona. He earned a BS in Biology in 1990 and an MS in Biophysics in 1993 from Tsinghua University, a PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Southern California, and completed postdoctoral training in Neuroscience at the University of California, San Francisco.

Bao's research specializes in the molecular, cellular, synaptic, and circuit mechanisms underlying physiological and pathological neural plasticity in the auditory system. His investigations address hearing loss-related sensory and cognitive disorders, including tinnitus, auditory processing deficits, dementia, anxiety, and depression. Expertise encompasses auditory cortex plasticity, neuroinflammation in tinnitus and hearing loss, parvalbumin-positive interneuron functions, synaptic plasticity, excitatory-inhibitory balance, noise-induced auditory processing deficits, developmental brain disorders, traumatic brain injury, and auditory perceptual learning. Bao has authored numerous publications in leading journals. Key works include "Contributions of Hearing Loss and Traumatic Brain Injury to Blast-Induced Cortical Parvalbumin Neuron Loss and Auditory Processing Deficits" (Journal of Neurotrauma, 2023); "Chemogenetic Activation of Cortical Parvalbumin-Positive Interneurons Reverses Noise-Induced Impairments in Gap Detection" (Journal of Neuroscience, 2021); "Neuroinflammation mediates noise-induced synaptic imbalance and tinnitus in rodent models" (PLoS Biology, 2019); "Neuroinflammation Model of Tinnitus" (Textbook of Tinnitus, 2024); "COVID-19 vaccination-related tinnitus is associated with pre-vaccination metabolic disorders" (Frontiers in Pharmacology, 2024); "Cortical remodelling induced by activity of ventral tegmental dopamine neurons" (Nature, 2001); "Temporal plasticity in the primary auditory cortex induced by operant perceptual learning" (Nature Neuroscience, 2004); "Suppression of cortical representation through backward conditioning" (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2003).