Christopher Braun

A long-time Hunter College leader, Dr. Christopher Braun serves as Special Advisor to the President for Science, and as Associate Provost for Research. Chris is well-known to the Hunter community, since he has been a professor in the Psychology Department since 2001 and is a former chair of the department and co-chair of the Council of Chairs. He has done tremendous work for Hunter College.

• PhD in Neurosciences, University of California at San Diego

All of the research in my lab can be related to the simple question: What do animals know about their world, and how do they know it? Indeed, all animals experience the world through their perceptions, so the world is literally defined by the sensory information available.  I am particularly interested in understanding the tremendous diversity of sensory systems across the animal kingdom.  The breadth of sensory systems found in fishes (the most diverse group of animals with backbones) offers countless opportunities to examine the results of natural evolutionary experiments.  What can some species perceive that others cannot, and what specific features of their sensory apparatus are responsible for that difference in performance?  We use a variety of techniques to probe the relationship between nervous system structure and sensory function, ranging from studies of peripheral sensory structures and the organization of sensory processing in the brain, to behavioral and physiological studies of sensory abilities.

• 2008 Dailey, DD and CB Braun, Sonic Audition is the Dominant Mode of Dipole-Source Detection in Goldfish (Carassius auratus).  Journal of Experimental Psychology (in print).

• 2008  Xiao, J and CB Braun, Objective threshold estimation and measurement of the residual background noise in auditory evoked potentials of goldfish and.  Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, (in print).