King’s College London
Abigail Tucker is a Professor of Development and Evolution at King’s College London. Her research focuses on the formation of the ear and hearing.
Abigail obtained her DPhil from the University of Oxford, before working as a post-doctoral fellow at Guy’s Hospital, London. In 1999, she set up her own lab as a Wellcome Trust Research Career Development fellow in the MRC Centre for Developmental Neurobiology at King’s College London. In 2002 she moved to the Centre for Craniofacial and Regenerative Biology, also at King’s College London.
Professor Tucker is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Biology and of the Linnean Society, and President-elect of the Anatomical Society.
Finding ways to improve treatments to repair the eardrum after damage
Read about Abigail’s research projectAbigail’s approaches to hearing research
Our ability to hear is so important for daily life, allowing us to interact with the environment and communicate. The development of the ear is a great example of how different tissues need to interact in the embryo in order to make a functional structure.
For the ear this involves the inner ear, middle ear, and outer ear. The three parts of the ear form from different tissues, at different time points, and have independently evolved during mammalian evolution, yet they must all coordinate to create the organ of hearing. If things go wrong hearing is impacted from birth, or even much later in life. This complex development makes the ear a fascinating structure to work on.
In this grant, we are looking at how the stem cells that live in the ear drum can be stimulated to improve healing. This is important as rupture of the ear drum is very common, particularly in small children, and can lead to pain, permanent hearing loss, and tinnitus. We are aiming to produce novel ways to stimulate the ear’s own cells so that these problems are avoided in the future, ultimately providing a surgery-free solution.
RNID studentships provide funds to tackle important problems in hearing but also support training of the next generation of scientists. This is essential, creating a pipeline to ensure we have the experts we need to solve the hearing issues of the future.