Congratulations graduating seniors!
Ishani Ray joined the McCullagh lab in Spring 2021 as a sophomore and quickly started working with Team Mouse and graduate student Amita Chawla on her Ph.D. project. She has been a great asset to the lab and her colleagues and recently took on her own independent project. During her tenure in the lab, she received the prestigious Purdie Scholarship to fund her research, has presented her work at many conferences including but not limited to NCUR and Learning & Memory, and received travel funding to offset her travel costs. We are excited to see what Ishani is going to do next, and I’m glad to hear that her future will likely involve doing research in some capacity.
McKenleigh Kelly joined the McCullagh lab in August 2022. Even though she has not been in the lab very long, she has brought immeasurable qualities to the lab. She is patient and kind always willing to help wherever she can even volunteering to take notes for Team Mouse meetings and disseminating them to everyone. She is always a positive presence in the lab and genuinely excited about whatever task you give her. We wish we had more time in the lab with you, and know that you also are going to go on and do amazing things with your degree in Communication Sciences.
Kaitlyn Welker (left) joined the lab in Spring 2021 where she quickly became one of the biggest supporters of Team Frog. Kaitlyn is an excellent researcher and has taken on many projects independently, especially as Team Frog members have dwindled, she has kept it alive. We has worked on many different projects in the lab involving frogs and her work on helping create a tree frog brain atlas, tree frog ABRs, and tree frog histology have been invaluable contributions. She has also been a delight at lab meetings pushing against outlandish ideas and offering some of her own. It has been incredible to watch her grow as a scientist and we are excited for her future in Australia pursuing her master’s degree.
Elizabeth Farmer is another Team Frog member that joined the lab in Fall 2021. She has been a great contribution to the lab collecting and analyzing parasitized green frog ABRs and helping with analyses of tree frog ABRs. She also won the Karen L Smith poster presentation award for her work on green frogs. We are excited to see what she will do next and I know her interests in microbiology will serve her well and hopefully she will get into a great masters program to continue her research aspirations.
Madeline Loosen joined the McCullagh lab in Fall 2021. She is a physiology major with aspirations for medical school. We think she is highly deserving of this future career and she received the Dr. Raymond Dixon Scholarship in rural health last year. She has been a tireless worker in the lab performing immunofluorescence (IF) experiments on prairie vole brains. She has taught at least half the lab how to perform brain slicing experiments and IF. We know that whatever she does in the future she will succeed.
We really enjoy the time we get with our undergraduates, they really do make up the heart of the lab. While often their time in lab is too short, we are really lucky to get to work with them as they grow into independent researchers. This year we are losing 5 awesome undergraduates to their degrees, but I am so excited for each of them and I know they are going to go on and do amazing things.
Awards
Members of the McCullagh lab received several awards this Spring.
–Vanessa Franco was awarded a Wentz scholarship for Fall 2023-Spring 2024 and presented her work at the Society for Integrative Biology (SICB) in Austin, TX in January 2023 through the support of the Charlotte Magnum scholarship provided by SICB
–Luberson Joseph received an IB graduate program travel award to travel to the Animal Behavior Society conference in Portland, OR this summer
–Sabiha Alam received an IB graduate program travel award for travel to the Society for Neuroscience conference in D.C. this Fall 2023
–Jesse Hurd received the outstanding Ph.D. student TA award
–Margaret New received the IB Outstanding Biology Senior award
–Dustin Meadows, a recent addition to the McCullagh lab, received the IB Lyle Family Scholarship
–Shay Nguyen presented their work at both the GCURS and NCUR representing the McCullagh lab well!
Publications
We have had several publications come out of the McCullagh lab in the last year…
Sabiha Alam had her first publication in the McCullagh lab accepted in October 2022. It is a comprehensive review on nutritional interventions in Fragile X Syndrome and Autism Spectrum Disorders with specific focus on basic research, pre-clinical, and clinical studies. Alam S, Westmark CJ, McCullagh EA (2022) Diet in the treatment of Autism Spectrum Disorders. Frontiers in Neuroscience accepted 10/31/22 doi:10.3389/fnins.2022.1031016
Liz McCullagh and her co-authors that all presented a symposium at the Association for Research in Otolaryngology in 2022 worked together to publish a review highlighting the importance of comparative animal models for hearing research that was recently published in the Annual reviews for the journal Hearing Research. Capshaw G*, Brown AD, Pena JL, Carr CE, Christensen-Dalsgaard J, Tollin DJ, Womack MC*, McCullagh EA* (2023)The continued importance of comparative auditory research to modern scientific discovery. Hearing Research 2023:108766. doi.org/10.1016/j.heares.2023.108766
Liz McCullagh also got together with co-authors Anna Sumera, Sam Booker, and Ben-Zheng Li to write a perspective piece for a special edition in the American Chemical Society (ACS) Chemical Neuroscience. In this article, we discuss the importance of dendritic spines in neurodevelopmental disorders with a focus on analysis, new tools for quantifying, and the best tools for different types of research questions. Li B-Z*, Sumera A*, Booker S#, McCullagh EA# (2023) Current best practices for analysis of dendritic spine morphology and number in neurodevelopmental research. ACS Chemical Neuroscience doi.org/10.1021/acschemneuro.3c00062 *co-first author #co-corresponding author
This summer holds a lot of interesting projects and hopefully some more good news in terms of publications, awards, and research endeavors. We are excited to host our first ON-RaMP technician for the coming summer and year, veterinary student Rachel Scherer, and of course our undergraduate and graduate researchers. In addition, we will have our first visit from colleague Giulia Bertolin through funding from the FACE Foundation to get our project on mitochondrial dysfunction in FXS off the ground.
Elizabeth McCullagh Lab 