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Brad Buran

Biography

Bradley Buran lost his hearing when he was 18 months old. But his list of accomplishments shows that he hasn't let deafness slow him down. Still, he is aware of the extra effort it takes to function at a high level in a hearing society and to deal with lingering social stigma surrounding being deaf. "I hope to dispel this stigma through my actions and help provide deaf people throughout the world with new opportunities and choices through my research," he writes.

He intends for that research to be in the field of hair cell regeneration, which holds promise in developing treatments for a number of sensorineural auditory disorders. Bradley observes, "Damage to the auditory hair cells, which transduce sound vibrations into electrical impulses, is one of the leading causes of deafness." Bradley hopes to conduct this research as a member of a university staff where he can also teach undergraduate biology classes to deaf students.

Bradley launched the Sign Language Club at the University of Maryland in his sophomore year. The club goes beyond teaching Sign Language to advocacy for the deaf culture.

Bradley remembers that his interest in science began after he received a cochlear implant that allows him to hear environmental sounds, such as a phone ringing, but not well enough to understand speech. "I began to wonder whether it was possible that more effective alternatives to an electronic device could be developed to help deaf people hear again." So he went to the National Institutes of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders at the National Institutes of Health and volunteered to do research in Dr. Doris Wu's lab. He continued his research there until his third year in college when he transferred to Dr. Arthur N. Popper's auditory neuroscience lab at the University of Maryland.

Bradley has published and presented his research findings at a number of forums. Along with Soroush Rais-Bahrami, he also began a journal devoted exclusively to topics on human biodiversity and variation that they hope will become an international forum for biological anthropology.

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