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Question 4 transcript:
"I personally study it largely by what you can think of as the watchmakers' approach, except it is the watchmakers reverse approach, take the ear apart. When an animal strands and dies, we start dissecting the head. It is called necropsy, to examine the body. So what we do is to work in my lab, people in my lab work specifically on the head and we start looking at the head. It is not just at the ears. You don't just run in and grab the ears. Ideally, what you want to do is to take a look at the whole head and try to understand how the ears fit into it and then fit into the physics of underwater sound. Most recently we've been very lucky in getting a CAT scanner, a computerized tomography scanner, just like they have in hospitals. And we use that scanner to take apart the head. It takes a lot less time than it does to go out there and cut it up on the beach. So what we want to do is see how that whole head is adapted for being able to hear or to see or any of the other senses. And then particularly the ears, how they are adapted, on a macro scale inside the head, to pick up sound and transduce it into something that the nervous system can use. And then inside that inner ear to actually see how that mechanical pressure is changed into a neural signal that the brain understands."

1. How did you first become interested in science?
2. What is the focus of your research and why did you choose this field of study?
3. What have been some of the recent discoveries about how marine mammals hear?
4. How do you study the hearing of marine mammals?
5. What challenges have you faced in studying the hearing of marine mammals?
6. What has most surprised you about the hearing of marine mammals?
7. What skills are important in your area of research?
8. What are the opportunities in studying the hearing of marine mammals? Can people without PhDs participate in some way in this type of research?
9. What is the greatest impact/relevance of your research?
10. What continues to inspire you about your work?
11. What advice would you give a high school student who expressed an interest in pursuing a career in your field?