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Conversation with a Colleague: Joseph A. Sisneros: The Soniferous Life of Midshipman Fish Joseph A. Sisneros Conversation with a Colleague Editor: Micheal L. Dent Figure 1. Joe Sisneros with a plainfin midshipman. Meet Joseph A. Sisneros Joseph A. (Joe) Sisneros is the first subject of our new “Sound Perspectives” essay series “Conversation with a Colleague.” Joe is currently a professor in the Psychol- ogy Department at the University of Washington, Seattle (see sisneroslab.org). He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from California State University, Long Beach, California, and his PhD from the Florida Institute of Technology (FIT), Melbourne. He completed his post- doctoral training at Cornell University, Ithaca, New York. Joe is a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and serves as an associate editor for The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. We asked Joe to give us his elevator pitch and then to elaborate on his inspirations, contributions, and hopes for the future. Give your “elevator speech” about the thrust(s) of your scholarly work over your career. How well can you hear? If you are like me, a middle-aged person, you may have trouble hearing high-frequency sounds or have difficulty being able to discriminate cer- tain sounds in a loud room. What if I told you that the fish that I study may “hold the key” to improving hear- ing in older humans? My lab is interested in how steroid hormones such as testosterone and estrogen enhance hearing sensitivity to high frequencies within an ani- mal’s hearing range. We study the plainfin midshipman (Porichthys notatus), a vocal fish that is highly dependent on the production and reception of acoustic signals for its social behaviors (Figure 1). Thus, it has become a good model species to investigate the neural basis of acoustic communica- tion. Female midshipman rely on their auditory sense to detect and locate calling males during the breed- ing season. Work from our lab has shown that females exhibit reproductive-state and hormone-dependent changes in the auditory sensitivity of the saccule, the main organ of hearing in the midshipman and most other fishes, such that reproductive females are better able to hear the advertisement calls of potential mates than nonreproductive females. The primary mechanism for this reproductive state-dependent change in hearing sensitivity is estrogen. In support of these findings, stud- ies of human and rodent females with Turner’s syndrome, a genetic aberration that results in the loss of ovarian estrogen production and decreased estrogen-receptor expression in the cochlea, show that females with this syndrome exhibit a progressive loss in high-frequency hearing with development. These mammalian studies support the link between estrogen and high-frequency hearing sensitivity. Might circulating levels of estrogen ©2022 Acoustical Society of America. All rights reserved. 72 Acoustics Today • Summer 2022 | Volume 18, issue 2 https://doi.org/10.1121/AT.2022.18.2.72