© SCOTT GOLDAs a senior at Anna University in Chennai, India, in the early 1990s, engineering major Khaleel Razak helped design a telephone for the hard of hearing, using the alphanumeric keypad to transmit messages for display. His group tested a prototype at a local school for the hearing-impaired, where Razak witnessed children communicating with people at a distance for the first time. He decided he wanted to go to the U.S. to study bioengineering.
After earning a master’s degree at the University of Wyoming, Razak stayed to join the lab of Zoltan “Nick” Fuzessery, who studies auditory pathways in the pallid bat. The pallid bat is unusual in that it echolocates only to navigate its environment, not to hunt, as most bats do. Instead, the animal simply listens for the rustlings of insects and arachnids on the ground, a behavior known as gleaning. So, as a pallid bat is flying around looking for prey, it must process environmental sounds while receiving navigational echoes back from its flight path. “The pallid bat is essentially mentally patting its head and rubbing its stomach at the same time,” says Fuzessery.
For his PhD dissertation, Razak recorded signals from neurons in the bat ...
