David Goyer is a postdoc in the lab of Michael Roberts at the Kresge Hearing Research Institute, University of Michigan. He began his training as an auditory neuroscientist at RWTH Aachen University in Germany, receiving a university diploma (equiv. to M.Sc.) in 2012, majoring in zoology / neurobiology with minors in human biology, biomimetics and biomedical engineering. He then went on to pursue his doctorate in neuroscience at RWTH Aachen University, graduating in 2016.
During his time as an undergraduate and as a PhD student, Dr. Goyer was working in the lab of Dr. Thomas Kuenzel and was co-mentored by Prof. Hermann Wagner. Here, Dr. Goyer became interested in the neural circuits that underlie sound source localization in birds and mammals. The main focus of his research was how cholinergic modulation of a cell type in the cochlear nucleus of the mongolian gerbil, so called spherical bushy cells, influences their timing and precision to incoming stimuli. Additionally, Dr. Goyer investigated the synaptic development of the enbulb of Held, a large and powerful synapse in the cochlear nucleus, and how postsynaptic proteins interact with the presynaptic terminal to shape its morphology and synaptic transmission.
Now, David Goyer is a postdoc in the lab of Michael Roberts, PhD at the University of Michigan. His current research is focused on the functional role of VIP neurons in the inferior colliculus, a highly integrative nucleus in the auditory midbrain, and how they might be involved in encoding speech cues and sound source localization, using a wide array of methods including electrophysiology, optogenetics and histochemistry.
