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Christoph E. Schreiner is a German-American neuroscientist and Professor of Otolaryngology at the University of California, San Francisco. His research on the functional organization of the central auditory system in the mammalian brain has elucidated the encoding of complex sounds, such as speech and communication signals, in normal and hearing impaired models. He is best known for his pioneering work to describe the response properties and topographical organization of neurons in the mammalian auditory cortex. He is the recipient of the 2022 Association for Research in Otolaryngology Award of Merit, which cited him for illuminating "many key aspects of auditory cortical information processing and their subcortical origins."

Early life and education
Schreiner grew up in Zernien, Germany, where his father was the local doctor and delivered him in their home clinic. He came from a long line of teachers, and earlier, theologians, but his father, uncle and brother were all physicians who attended medical school at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. Schreiner followed the same path, but pursued both a Doctor of Medicine and a Doctor of Philosophy in Physics at the same university. He worked under the tutelage of Prof. Manfred R. Schroeder, who was a faculty member at the Third Institute of Physics at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, renowned for using innovative applications of math to various acoustics problems in the real-world relating to speech, hearing, and concert hall acoustics. As he blended his interests in both human physiology and acoustics, he became convinced that psychophysics phenomena had to be understood in the context of both the biophysics and physiology of the sensory nervous system.

In 1977, with a fresh Physics PhD in hand and still completing his medical training, Schreiner embarked on actual physiological studies of the auditory system in his first postdoctoral position in Göttingen at the Max Planck Institute lab of Prof. Otto Creutzfeldt – an early pioneer in higher order visual neurophysiology who wanted to expand into audition. It was there that Schreiner published his first highly cited paper, on the “Thalamocortical transformation of responses to complex auditory stimuli” in 1980.

Career in auditory neuroscience
After completing his training in 1980, Schreiner was offered the chance to lead the Auditory Group at Max Planck, though he was encouraged by Creutzfeldt to first do a short postdoctoral stint with Michael M. Merzenich in California to broaden his experience with auditory neurophysiology experiments, as well as learn how other labs scientifically and technically approached physiology experiments. What was initially just a one-year fellowship eventually became a 30 year collaborative partnership that produced several canonical works on the organization of sound feature representations in the cortex, as well as the mechanisms and therapeutic applications of cortical plasticity.

Schreiner has remained at UCSF in the Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery for the entirety of his academic career. He started as an Assistant Research Physiologist in 1984 and rose through the University of California academic ranks to reach Professor in Residence in 1996, and to Professor in 2007. He served as Vice-Chair of the Department from 2004-2019. He also held the position of Professor in Bioengineering & Therapeutic Sciences from 2009-2024.

Schreiner has published more than 140 articles.

Functional cortical organization
A large part of Schreiner’s research focused on understanding the functional organization of the auditory cortex in rodents, cats, and new world monkeys. Electrophysiological mapping studies across various fields within the auditory cortex revealed a number of organizational principles and neuroanatomical correlates for temporal and spectral components of sounds   superimposed on or in addition to the well-known tonotopic organization.

Along with his long-time collaborator and friend Dr. Jeff Winer, Schreiner published a definitive reference on the Auditory Cortex in 2011.

Functional midbrain and thalamus organization
Schreiner's research demonstrated that spectral and temporal response properties and spatial organization in the inferior colliculus and the medial geniculate nucleus  show distinct differences from cortical neurons, giving rise to a neural coding transformation as sound information ascends the auditory neuraxis.

Schreiner and Winer published a comprehensive reference on the Inferior Colliculus in 2005.

Cortical plasticity
Another dimension of Schreiner's research has been to uncover the expressions and mechanisms of experience-induced representational plasticity in core auditory cortex, including for sound frequency, amplitude modulation, frequency modulation, and sound intensity. Specific interactions between excitatory and inhibitory inputs, modulated by release of neurotransmitters such as acetylcholine underlie rapid plastic changes of receptive fields and result in behaviorally testable changes in psychophysical performance.

Complex auditory receptive fields
Schreiner's lab expanded the computational tool set for characterizing nonlinear properties of central auditory responses. Using information-theoretic approaches and variations on the spike-triggered receptive field approach, they demonstrated that central, especially cortical, receptive fields require a more complex, multi-dimensional description to capture their processing than most midbrain or thalamic neurons.

Hearing impairment effects in cortex
Schreiner and colleagues published several key studies on the effect of electrical cochlear stimulation on the evoked activity in cortical neurons in animal models and on the expression of tinnitus in implant patients.

Academic service
Funded by the National Institutes of Health for over 30 years, Schreiner gave back by serving in several capacities. He reviewed NIH grants as a member of the AUD study section of the Center for Scientific Review and chaired it from 2005-2007. He served on the Advisory Council for the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (2016-2019) and was a member of the Multi Council Workgroup for the BRAIN Initiative.

On an international scale, he has been the chair of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Cluster of Excellence "Hearing4All" program in Oldenburg, Germany since 2011. He has also served on the editorial board for Hearing Research, Experimental Brain Research, and was an Associate Editor for the Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology and the journal Audiology & Neuro-Otology.

Trainees
Schreiner advised or co-advised 22 doctoral students, and 25 post-doctoral fellows.

Personal life
While working in the Coleman Laboratory at UCSF with Michael M. Merzenich, he met cochlear implant team audiologist, Marcia Raggio. Since his postdoctoral fellowship at UCSF was only for one year, he returned to his work at the Max Planck Institute in Göttingen. However, he returned to San Francisco within a year. He and Marcia were married in San Francisco in 1988. He became a loving stepfather to Marcia’s son, Noah, and their daughter Christina was born in 1991. Christina completed her clinical doctorate in psychology at the Wright Institute in Berkeley in 2023.