It’s always bittersweet when students graduate or leave. I am so thankful for all of the contributions they have brought to the lab, including helping me set everything up and helping me learn to be a mentor.

This year brings a particularly large cohort of students who are graduating – here is some a tidbit of the projects that they worked on:

Team Frog 🐸

Molly Hood – co-advised with Dr. Jodie Wiggins

Molly hopes to go to dental school, and I have no doubt that she will get there! Molly had the daunting task of getting some of the anatomy on frogs going in the lab. She was certainly up for the challenge and learned brain slicing (on two different types of vibratomes), immunofluorescence, H & E staining, as well as a source of constant support to her fellow Team Frog cohort. She recently presented their work at the Karen L. Smith undergraduate research symposium.

Kanece Ham

Kanece just recently joined the lab, we wish we had found each other sooner! She may stick around for the summer and continue to help out with Team Frog, which we are very much looking forward to. Happy Graduation!

Courtney Byrd

Courtney has been a wonderful addition to my lab. I was so happy when she interviewed and wanted to join Dr. Michael Reichert’s lab. She has such great insight for experiments and endless ideas of future directions for work. It is clear she is also passionate about teaching, have received the Departmental M.S. Teaching Award in her first year as a graduate student. Your future students are lucky to have you and I know you are going to excel as a K-12 teacher.

Team Microscope 🔬

Alex Blackwell (OK-LSAMP)

Alex was one of the first students in my lab, and I could not be more grateful to have her working with me! Between analyzing auditory brainstem data, learning to use the epifluorescent microscope to take images, and train others in the lab, she has been a great resource. We wish you the best of luck for your senior year closer to your family.

Prekshika Patel

While Prekshika joined the lab recently, she jumped right in with both feet! She has been instrumental in keeping up with the microscope imaging that Addi and Jordyn keep pumping out. Thank you!

Team Wild Rodent 🐁

Jordyn Sisovsky

I had the pleasure of teaching Jordyn in Spring 2020 for my Behavioral Neuroendocrinology class, and I am so glad she reached out to join the lab last Fall. She has learned both auditory brainstem physiology and anatomical methods with apparent ease. Always fearless when we are out collecting wild rodents and working with animals in whatever capacity, we are surely going to miss your skills! We hope you can stick around some this summer and continue working in the lab in your spare time.

Team Mouse 🐭 (Mus spicilegus)

Bailey Hinshaw (Honors Student)

Bailey was the first student to reach out to me about research opportunities (before I even joined as faculty at OSU!). She is a constant presence in the lab and quickly took on and lead her independent Honors thesis project. In addition to being a great scientist, Bailey has been a rock for the lab and her lab mates. She is always available to help out whenever needed and happy to take on any challenge that comes her way. She is going to be an excellent doctor and I wish you the best in medical school!

Allison Lawrence

Allison was a student of mine in Fall 2020 Principles of Neuroscience. She has been super helpful in doing the dirty work of the lab including helping me renovate the animal space in preparation for the arrival of my mice. We are hoping she will be around this summer to continue with analysis help and wish her best of luck in her dreams to be a veterinarian.

I am beyond honored to be awarded the Margaret S. Ewing Outstanding Mentor Award by the Zoology Graduate Student Society (ZoGSS). Here are the lovely things they had to say:

Finally, the Margaret S. Ewing Outstanding Mentor Award goes to a faculty or staff member who has dedicated excellence involved with mentoring students. This year’s recipient joined OSU in January 2020 and is already a mentor to 13 undergraduate students, two Master’s students, and one PhD student with two additional graduate students joining this summer. She is dedicated to building a research lab that is both diverse and inclusive by creating spaces which allow students to bring who they are to every aspect of their work. She is also serves as a faculty mentor on the OSU branch of Out in STEM, a non-profit national organization that empowers LGBTQ+ people to succeed personally and professionally in STEM. She is also a strong advocate for women in STEM, as she was one of the founding members of 500 Women Scientists, a non-profit organization that is dedicated to making science open, inclusive, and accessible by fighting racism, the patriarchy, and oppressive societal norms that women and nonbinary people often face in STEM. Additionally, she spearheaded the Expanding Your Horizons (EYH) conference, which is a weekend-long symposium designed to introduce middle-school girls to engaging careers in STEM and in the process builds a supportive community of young women scientists as they continue their STEM engagement. ZoGSS is pleased to present this award to Dr. Elizabeth McCullagh!

Here is some info about the amazing woman after which the award is named: “Dr. Margaret S. Ewing received an M.S. in 1964 and a Ph.D. in 1966, both in Zoology from Oklahoma State University. In her distinguished career in Zoology, she has published numerous peer-reviewed manuscripts and coauthored two books.  Dr. Ewing has received noteworthy awards for teaching and other scholarly work, including the AMOCO Foundation Outstanding Teaching Award, the OSU Regents Distinguished Teaching Award, the American Fisheries Society Distinguished Service Award, and the Burlington Northern Foundation Faculty Achievement Award, among others. The Zoology Graduate Student Society named their outstanding mentor award for her. Moreover, she has contributed to the Women’s Studies Program and has brought into the light issues related to support for women in science. Dr. Ewing was the first woman promoted to full professor in the Department of Zoology at OSU.” From https://integrativebiology.okstate.edu/news/integrative-biology-news/12-recent-news/68-margaret-s-ewing-endowed-distinguished-lectureship-established

Dr. McCullagh’s work on the gage. directory was featured in the College of Arts and Sciences at Oklahoma State University as a news piece.

Sign up today!!! https://gage.500womenscientists.org/

#STEMMrepresentation

#whatascientistlookslike

#diversityinSTEMM

Read 📖 more here: https://news.okstate.edu/articles/arts-sciences/2021/gage_database.html

The auditory brainstem response (ABR) is a neural (brain 🧠) signal that is generated by an area of the brain that processes sound location information. The McCullagh lab is relatively new to working with frogs 🐸, setting up a new system for neural recordings, and are in the middle of a pandemic 😷. SO it was with great pleasure that we celebrate some wins when things actually work! We were able to get some (really great) recordings today using our set up and it was all run by two masters students in the lab Rachael Brodsky and Courtney Byrd (co-advised with Dr. Michael Reichert (https://reichertlab.com/, @FrogListener)). We would not have been able to get the recordings (or it certainly would have taken a lot longer) without the help of a Zoom call from experts Dr. Megan Gall and Dr. Mark Bee. Thank you both for helping out with the fix!! Stay tuned for some really cool data from Rachael Brodsky’s masters thesis in collaboration with Dr. Matt Bolek.

Cheers 🥂 to science!

Powered by 500 Women Scientists, we launched a major update to the Request a Woman in STEMM platform- now gage.

Read the medium post here with more details: https://500womenscientists.medium.com/gage-quashing-the-matilda-effect-5d917f55a0e1

We got up early this morning (got to the site at 7:30, which is dawn right now!?) to try and catch some wild rodents. We are interested in how different rodent and insectivore species process sound location information. We were hoping to catch some beasties to measure vocalizations, their auditory brainstem responses, and look at some anatomical markers in the brainstem. The auditory brainstem response is a neurophysiological output of the key areas of the brain responsible for understanding where a sound is coming from. We can use this response to understand variability in hearing range (frequency), binaural (both ear) hearing, sex differences in hearing, and any hearing loss animals might have. Different species that we find can provide us more information about the diversity of factors that influence the ability to process where sounds originate.

Today we weren’t able to catch anything, but we are hoping, now that we have the tools to try, we can get this data very soon!!

Exciting things coming soon from Team Wild Rodent! Big props to undergrad and Freshman Research Scholar Margaret New for driving up from Edmond bright and early to set some traps with me and Dr. Scott McMurry for providing us the traps and the know-how.

The McCullagh Lab needs more masters and PhD students!

Graduate positions available (masters and PhD) in new faculty’s lab in the Integrative Biology Department at Oklahoma State University.
*Funding available through TAships and summer funding provided through start up until grant funding is obtained.
*Research conducted in the lab focuses on Neuroscience and specifically sound localization processing in the brain of vertebrates. More narrowly, projects available exploring auditory hypersensitivity/binaural hearing in autism spectrum disorder and Fragile X Syndrome, comparative Biology of rodent and amphibian species.
*Techniques the lab uses include: anatomy/histology, in vivo physiology, behavior, data analytics, optogenetics, viral tracing, knock out mouse strains/genetic mouse strains.

Women and underrepresented minorities are strongly encouraged to apply.

*Preferred skills for applicants:

1. willingness to learn and motivation to work hard (while keeping work/life balance and mental health),
2. coding experience (R, Python, Matlab),
3. wet lab/field experience, strong letters of reference

If based in the US could potentially start in Spring 2021. Else start date would likely be summer 2021/Fall 2021.

Funding is around 23K (not including summer funding). Summer support is available for at least one summer (possibly two, for a total of almost 31K of annual support). Hopefully research assistant support will become available with future grant funding. Applicants will be strongly encouraged to apply for extramural funding (with support from Dr. McCullagh) to support their careers.

The lab’s research centers around measuring brain responses to auditory stimuli. In order to measure auditory responses accurately, we need to place animals in a space that reduces sounds that are coming from the environment. This ensures that the recordings we make are only from sounds we introduce to the animal. With a chamber of this size, we can measure auditory brainstem responses (ABRs) which are signals we can get from electrodes placed on the scalp (or just under the skin) of animal to record impulses from areas of the brain responsible for the ability to localize sound sources. Additionally, we can put electrodes in the brain of animals while playing sound and record directly from auditory regions.

What types of things are we hoping to learn? Some of the projects in the lab that use these techniques are:

-Recording from frogs and toads that live in different environments (terrestrial, aquatic, burrowing) to see if these environments impact the brain’s encoding of sound location information.

-Measuring responses from mice with mutations that lead to autistic behaviors, such as Fragile X Syndrome, to see how their sound localization pathways are impacted.

-Working with Dr. Michael Reichert (https://reichertlab.com/) to determine if sensitivity to different auditory stimuli in Grey Treefrogs is seasonally or hormonally dependent.

-Measuring the brains of other cool animals (naked mole rats, prairie dogs, etc.) to determine how they process sound information that may lead to insights into how the brain works and what specializations different species have in this auditory pathway.

Stay tuned for more lab updates and hopefully publications etc. related to this work!

*Video below shows a recording from the brain of an anesthetized gerbil. Sound you hear is the neuron firing in tune with a low frequency sound we are playing the gerbil. You can see as I unplug sound to one ear, the firing stops and that as I change the frequency of the sound I am playing to the gerbil, the firing (the squiggly lines on the recording) go away. This suggests the neuron I am recording from is both frequency and sensitive to sound played only to one ear.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wtry8acgwqz6fif/MNTB%20recording%20flipped.mp4?dl=0

Hi everyone,   I have been thinking for a while about the best way to use my words and power as a faculty member at Oklahoma State University. 

My job description as I know it, involves three aspects: 1. Research, 2. Teaching, 3. Service. Across all of these areas, I also need to be a mentor to you all. As a mentor, I take my job very seriously, and I want to offer to you the best of myself, my knowledge, and skills. To that end, I know that academia and science has not always served each of us, and our experiences getting into science are going to be very different based on a lot of factors. 

Here is my commitment to you across each of those areas above:

Research:

I hope to build a lab that is not only diverse, but also inclusive. Many studies have shown that we all do better science when diverse voices are included. What is often neglected is that in order to include diverse voices equally, we need inclusion. To me, inclusion means having a space where you can share your ideas freely without fear and can bring WHO YOU ARE right now to every aspect of your work. Science is about learning from mistakes, we all make them and we learn and grow from each of them. Do not be afraid to fail. Negative data is always interesting and we gain knowledge from everything that we do, failures and successes. 

Teaching:

As a teacher, my goal is for you to learn. Learning looks different for every individual. While it may be difficult, I am committed to teaching you in many different ways to help you gain knowledge. I will give you hands-on projects, written materials, reading assignments, writing projects, teaching opportunities, and opportunities to listen. If you don’t understand something in one format I have presented to you, I am happy to present it in a different way. You may not get everything I am trying to teach you in one of the above formats. That is okay. One of the other formats may resonate more with you, or it may take the third, fourth, or more times hearing something to get it. That is normal. I am open to feedback.

Service:

I am passionate about many different things. I assume you have passions outside of research as well. That is awesome. Use those things that you are passionate about to take a break from science as needed (or if you can incorporate it into your science!). Personally, I am passionate about social justice, equity, inclusion, and diversity efforts. I want to change what a scientist looks like. I want to be on the front lines of a fight against the patriarchy, racism, sexism, and anything else that stands in the way of a world where we can all be free and live. I hope that you will join me. 

I am listening. I am learning. I am not perfect. I am committed to growing and trying to be a little bit better every day. I am committed to you.

 

Check out our latest work on spatial hearing ability of mice with a genetic form of autism spectrum disorder (Fragile X Syndrome).

https://www.eneuro.org/content/7/1/ENEURO.0300-19.2019.abstract

Summary: FXS mice startle to loud sounds like control mice, but maybe have some subtle changes in their ability to localize sound sources, whether it be a gap in noise, change in speaker location, or a signal from a noisy background. In addition, they seem to take longer to respond than control mice.