WATERVILLE -- Colby College professor Jan Holly is a mathematician with a great interest in neuroscience.

That combination is what led Holly to study the inner ear and, more specifically, the issues of dizziness and imbalance and how they lead to misperception of self-motion.

Holly has invested a great deal of research time to the subject and at least one federal agency sees it as time well spent.

That explains why the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services earlier this month awarded Holly $205,994 to continue her research -- the second such grant she has received from the agency.

"This one is essentially a renewal of the one I got three years ago," she said. "It allows me to hire more students and allows more experiments to be done based on my modeling."

It also enables Holly to connect with a colleague who works for NASA. That colleague has the right stuff in terms of equipment to spin, tilt and basically shake up a person's vestibular system.

The vestibular system is the sensory processing center in the inner ear that tries to make sense of the motion to the person undergoing the spinning and tilting.

"I ask what they perceive their own motion to be," Holly said, "which surprisingly is often not what the motion actually is. I take the data and analyze it and look for patterns. The goal is to figure out what is happening in the inner ear and, ultimately, the goal is to better understand inner ear disorders."

Sarah Harmon, a Colby sophomore, has helped Holly in her research, including an experiment in Sidney that involved putting people on a centrifuge -- basically a chair attached to a beam that rotates around a center rod at high speeds.

Harmon, who is majoring in both biology and computer science, said the subjects were fitted with microphones so they could record their perceptions while going through the motion.

Holly has managed to bring animation into her analysis of perception and motion, so as to provide visual testament to the fact that perception and reality can often be worlds apart.

In doing this work, Holly said her hope is to get a better understanding of the vestibular system. This in turn could help to better support those with inner ear disorders, she said.

"A large percent of such disorders are almost impossible to diagnose," she said. "You can't just look at the inner ear and know what is wrong. You have to go with what the patient says and (that patient's) eye movements."

Colin Hickey -- 861-9205

chickey@centralmaine.com