Catherine Carr Named 2015 Distinguished University Professor

Catherine Carr joined 26 current CMNS professors (and 11 CMNS emeriti faculty members) who have received the Distinguished University Professor honor this summer.Distinguished University Professors are faculty members who have been recognized nationally and internationally for the importance of their scholarly achievements. They have also brought distinction to UMD through their broad activities as a scholar, teacher and public servant. Distinguished University Professors are selected by the university’s President, with recommendations from a committee composed of the Provost and seven members from diverse disciplines, including several Distinguished University Professors.

Carr, a professor in the Department of Biology, joined the University of Maryland faculty in 1990 as an assistant professor and was promoted to professor in 1999. She is also currently an ADVANCE Professor, acting as a role model and catalyst within CMNS for improving work environments for women. Carr is an international expert on the brainstem circuits that underlie sound localization. As a postdoctoral fellow at Caltech, she performed neurophysiological and anatomical studies of sound location in the barn owl. At UMD, she expanded her research to include neurophysiological changes associated with coding temporal information. She has developed recording techniques for working with young barn owls to understand the development of the neural code for interaural time differences. As a result, she is aware of the importance of understanding sound localization strategies among various land vertebrates and their relevance to the cochlear implant population. Her research has been continuously funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 1987, and she is the co-principal investigator on a new T-32 grant from NIH to train graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. In addition to her work at UMD, Carr has also been director of the neurobiology and behavior course at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Wood’s Hole, Mass., served on MBL’s science council and education committee, and directed the Grass Foundation Lab at MBL.

Carr is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She has received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, two Humboldt Foundation Senior Research awards, a Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg fellowship, an honorary doctorate from the University of Southern Denmark, and the University of Maryland College of Life Sciences Research Award.

Published July 16, 2015