The Oklahoma State University College of Arts & Sciences did a great feature on the Sound of Science exhibit (supported by a Community Engagement Grant from CAS to get us going). We presented the exhibit for the first time at the NAISEF, Native American Indian Science and Engineering Fair, in the Spring and they came and interviewed us about. We are hoping to get this exhibit going again later in the Fall and Spring to bring it on the road to schools and tradeshows if we receive additional funding. Big thanks also to Stillwater Designs (Kicker) for their endless support and making my dream a reality!

Here is a link to the feature: https://casinfo.okstate.edu/images/ePubs/CONNECT2024/24/index.html

And there’s a video interview portion here: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xJj5GSpdGM4

Thanks for the feature! See other blog posts to see more about the exhibit!

McCullagh lab at the Winter Karen L Smith undergraduate research symposium. Included are Bodhi, Luberson, Preston, Jesse, Cameron, Gracie, Sabiha, Margaret, Clare, Jesse, Madison, me, Gen, Rachel, and Anya. Bodhi got first place for his poster, and Tamara (not pictured) got third place!

We went to Society for Neuroscience in Washington D.C. where Sabiha (left picture) presented her poster on elemental alterations in Fragile X Syndrome across tissue types. Also got to present our work on myelination at a minisymposium organized by the amazing Ilse Gantois (right picture Francesco Longo, Ilse Gantois, Nisha Raj, me).

We finally got our first paper on prairie voles out of the lab! Spearheaded in the early days by undergraduate researcher Margaret New (who graduated and is hopefully going to crush PA school in the future). Support from many folks in the lab including Jesse, Gen, Peyton, Cameron, and Casey. Not to leave out folks at CU Anschutz/Denver including Nate Greene, Tim Lei and Ben-zheng Li. Check out the full paper here – https://pubs.aip.org/asa/jasa/article/155/1/555/3061584/Hearing-ability-of-prairie-voles-Microtus

Fabio Machado and I received a tech grant from the College of Arts & Sciences allowing us to get some Syglass (https://www.syglass.io/) systems for the lab and our courses (Mammology and Neuroscience). Left picture is Michael Morehead of Syglass and Gen demoing the system at the Association for Research in Otolaryngology. Right picture is Fabio Machado trying it out in my office for the first time.

Ultimate frisbee was still very much present with Hayride ultimate (https://x.com/HayrideUltimate) winning the Harvest Moon festival in Fayetteville (theme Gayride – top left pic). Folks from the Integrative Biology Department banded with me to play intramurals, which we won (middle top pic). For New Years also won a hat tournament hosted by Masters team Soar*sore (who also came in 2nd at Masters Nationals in 2023) https://x.com/Soar_dfw. Last but not least, coached Ultimato (https://x.com/okstateultimato) which met our goal of making regionals and winning a game (even if it was an unsanctioned rain out). Thanks to co-coaches (Layla, Addie, and Ciaran Shaughnessy).

We made lab pumpkins in the Fall!

The best doggo Jack is joining Pete’s Pet Posse for Class 11 to be a therapy dog at OSU. Here is a pic of him passing his Canine Good Citizen test with flying colors (https://hr.okstate.edu/pet-therapy/)

Members of the McCullagh lab presented at the Midwinter meeting of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology. Casey gave an amazing talk on pinna representing the lab well (left pic), Andi and Gen had their first conference posters, and Amita got to check out ARO for the first time.

The McCullagh lab was represented well at the Undergraduate research symposium! Jorja (left) also presented at the Human Performance and Nutrition Research Institute and got a poster prize as well as receiving a Niblack scholarship this year on her work on Alzheimers and estrogen deficiency in collaboration with Ed Lucas. Avery and Kami (middle picture) presented their work on hormonal expression in the auditory brainstem of wild rodent species (not picture Josh who is also working on this project). Grant and Olivia Emerson presented their work on Fragile X Syndrome mouse auditory behavioral development (right picture). Grant also received a Wentz fellowship this year.

McCullagh lab members received several awards at the Integrative Biology end of year banquet including Olivia and Grant Emerson, Casey, Sabiha, and Lu.

We had the opportunity to start to build and exhibit the Sound of Science in collaboration with Kicker and Aaron Surratt (check out our Honors course on sound offered this Fall). Peyton and Cameron spent the summer building the system and now we are starting to show it off with the first stop which was the Native American Indian Science and Engineering Fair in the Spring. Stay tuned for media from that event. Also check out when Peyton and Cameron went on Kicker’s Unmasked to talk about the exhibit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDN28LHxXDU

Got to go to Rennes and hang out with Giulia Bertolin so we could talk about our collaborative project on Fragile X Syndrome and mitochondria (preprint coming soon!). Was a very productive time despite all the wine pictures where we worked on a manuscript and brainstormed some ideas for grant proposals.

Had an amazing time talking science with super smart researchers on Fragile X and Autism at the Gordon Research Conference chaired by Kim Huber, who did a fantastic job at organizing one of my favorite conferences of my career. Was honored to co-chair the Power Hour with Melanie Brandabur of Ultragenyx where we discussed mentorship and imposter syndrome with our colleagues (photo on left). Also always a great trip to Barga to get some gelato.

Other notable lab happenings – just no pictures:

-Luberson received the Payne County Audubon Society Award to continue his work on wild rodent hearing, particularly in the context of human generated sound pollution.

-Gen is “graduating” as our first ON-RaMP technician and will be joining the lab in Fall 2024 as an MS student!

-Casey walked for her MS (will be defending in July) and will be joining the lab for her PhD in Fall 2024.

-Undergraduate students who are graduating include Josh Mckinney (wild rodent anatomy), Clare Barr (tonotopic hearing in FXS), Margaret New (everything wild rodent), Bodhi Hale (wild rodent hearing), Katelynn Rodman (HRTFs and pinna), Vanessa Franco (oligodendrocytes in FXS), and Madison Merideth (oligodendrocytes in FXS). We are so proud of all of you and know that you are going to go on and do amazing things!

-We are welcoming several new folks to the lab for the summer including Naleyshka Colon-Rivera (ON-RaMP 2024-2025), Sarah Hobbs (visiting undergrad from Connecticut), and Kate Watts (SRTP vet student). Also new undergraduates Anastacia Simmons and Julie Luper.

This summer, Dr. McCullagh’s Lab partnered with Kicker to bring the Sound of Science to schools and the public to learn about how sound works. Both Cameron Miller and I, Peyton Williams, were hired to design and build exhibits to stimulate excitement for science and to show how sound is created, displayed, and perceived by the brain. Of all the projects we built, our two favorites included the sound localization project and building a Kundt’s tube display.  For the sound localization design, an array of eight speakers were arranged in a circle with a switcher board located in the middle. This display will show viewers how sound is obtained by the human ear and how it is important to be in the right location to hear certain sounds. For the Kundt’s tube display, we wanted to show how a sound wave is created. We used an acrylic tube, filled it with small Styrofoam balls and built two caps for the ends, where one side had a speaker, and the other end was completely closed off. When the speaker is played, it shows how the different sound waves are created by different frequencies. If you are interested in taking a closer look and hearing more about the project, we presented a YouTube with Kicker’s Unmasked Live Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbRK9Ostbp4, to demonstrate all that has been built so far and how each display works. Overall, Cameron and I have had a great time working with Aaron Surrat from Kicker.  The project provided an awesome learning experience for both of us.

Sound production and reception are accessible topics for people to gain an interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields through its interdisciplinary nature (engineering, neuroscience, math, biology, etc.) and relatable features (sound waves, personal experience with sound). With the overall goal of stimulating excitement for STEM in people across ages, we are developing a mobile exhibit featuring sound production and reception in partnership with local speaker company, Kicker. Kicker will bring the display to festivals where they are presenting their company to bring science to the public where they are, rather than folks having to come to science spaces. The exhibit will also travel to local schools and be designed and tested on campus at OSU. We are creating an industry and academic partnership through design of the exhibit which will be a collaboration between an OSU undergraduate intern working both with Dr. McCullagh and the staff at Kicker. This project will lead to a broad impact, directly benefiting career and professional development for people at OSU designing the project, the OSU community that gets to learn as they interact with the exhibit, local Oklahoma schools, and the broader general public. This proposal exemplifies community engagement by partnering academia with local industry to directly impact local communities within Oklahoma and across the United States.

Primary objectives:

• Bring science to the public through tradeshows, school interaction, and OSU campus deployment
• Provide public-private experience for students working on the project and hands-on training relevant to multiple career paths
• Stimulate excitement for science in those interacting with the exhibit across ages

The position:

-Looking for an highly motivated undergrad interested in science communication/education and a strong interest or background in Biology/Physics/Neuroscience

-Hourly position for 20 hours per week split between time at Kicker, engaging stakeholders, and the McCullagh lab

-Start July 1st through August 18th at $17 / hr

-Preferred qualifications include ability to work with tools, communication skills, organized, motivated, and commitment to the project

For consideration send your CV/resume and short (500 words or less) statement of interest to Liz McCullagh (elizabeth.mccullagh@okstate.edu) by 5/31

Congratulations graduating seniors!

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.

It was, indeed, a great experience for the McCullagh lab attending SfN 2022 at San Diego, CA this year. Jesse, Amita and Sabiha presented their research in SfN in person, while Andi chose the virtual platform. Their experience added a new spice, when on November 11, their flight from Stillwater to Dallas got canceled. All of them including Dr. Liz were trying their best to find out any possible solution but nothing worked out, since all flights from Tulsa and OKC to Dallas and suddenly no option was left except driving to Dallas from Stillwater and Yesss, finally they made it. 

Jesse: “I had a great time at SfN, getting to meet so many new people and learn about so much ongoing research. At first, 24,000 people seems very overwhelming, but everything is pretty-well organized based on topic and field of interest, so it’s easy to find out where you want to be and who you’d like to meet. The vendors were fun, friendly, and sent me home with so many freebies I almost couldn’t zip my suitcase! San Diego is a beautiful city I was happy to enjoy with Liz, Sabiha, and Amita. Looking forward to next year in D.C.!”

Sabiha: For me, attending the conference in person and visiting San Diego both were my first time experience, so you can feel my excitement. I met a lot of scientists, students, scholars and got astonished to see how amazing and advanced neuroscience research can be and how differently people think and learn everything. There were a lot of options for mini symposiums, professional development workshops along with poster presentation sessions, which I found really helpful too to expand my knowledge that underlies my research interest. Also,the sparkling city light and bright sunshine is still on my mind. Such a beautiful and lively city is San Diego !

Andi: SfN virtual experience was good. There were so many videos from virtual submissions it was almost too much. It made it difficult to sort through and search for research that you were particularly interested in. There were live streams of minisymposium research that you could watch, about 20 minute presentations from the authors. There were also larger presentations that were about an hour you could watch, but my preference was the mini symposiums as the research was personally more intriguing. I had it on in the background while I worked, as each minisymposium was about 4 hours long. I feel like being virtual I did miss out on a lot of different research, as only a small portion of the total conference was part of the mini symposiums that were livestreamed.

Amita: Well, it is a big conference. It was my first in-person experience there with my advisor and lab members. We all had a great time there exploring knowledge through joining various poster sessions and lectures. We all presented posters there with a huge number of audience and suggestions from them. It was accomplished with dinner and a tour on the mission beach with my advisor and lab members having spent a great time with each other.

We had a wonderful summer full of work related and fun travel for folks in the lab, not to mention lots of lab work being done as well. It was a really great summer to have all 5 PhD students around as well as 5 undergrads who worked in the lab for the summer. Here are some highlights:

Amita and Andi traveled 🚗 to Iowa to Dr. Samuel Young’s lab to learn neonatal rodent injection techniques. Thanks Sam for hosting and for his lab for sharing their time. I know Andi and Amita learned a lot!

Liz had lots of work-related travel ✈️ including a trip to Tuscany Italy for the Gordon Research Seminar and Conference on Fragile X Syndrome and Autism where she presented a poster and talked about the lab’s work. In addition she attended the Animal Behavior Society meeting in San Jose, Costa Rica. There were also some fun trips in there to play ultimate frisbee with her club team Hayride and grand masters team at Nationals.

Back in the lab, students were busy studying sperm, collecting wild rodents 🐁 to measure their hearing 👂, running samples through the ICP, slicing 🧠, running behavioral experiments, collecting tree frogs 🐸, and so much more! Special shout out to Madeline, Shay, Kaitlyn, Vanessa, and Tamara who spent their undergraduate summer doing work in the lab.

To top off the summer, we got some really great news on a few things:

• Luberson, Amita, and Sabiha will be funded on RA for the next two years through a DEIA supplement to our current NIH R15 funding
• Andi will also be funded through a diversity supplement on RA for the next two years
• Exciting research collaboration starting with Dr. Guilia Bertolin in France 🇫🇷 over the next two years
• A paper from Liz’s postdoc on naked-mole rat hearing across development came out in Proceedings B (which also features lab alumni Addi Gaut who helped with immunofluorescence experiments)
• Liz became a part of the Weaving the Future of Animal Behavior (WFAB) program which helped fund her trip to Costa Rica and provides her with an awesome professional development cohort
• Liz gave a webinar to the Hearing Health Foundation on Central Auditory Processing Disorder (CAPD)
• Dr. Michael Reichert and Liz received funding for a new post baccalaureate program through NSF called ON-RaMP providing mentorship and training in biological sciences.
• Liz traveled back to Colorado to film her recent paper on coherent anti-stokes raman scattering (CARS) for measuring myelin that has been published in JoVE

We are really looking forward to Fall 2022 since I have a feeling all our hard work this summer is going to lead to more good news in the future. Thanks everyone for all your support and of course to all the students working and playing in the lab!

We have lots to celebrate in the lab this April! Here are some of the highlights:

Ph.D. student Jesse Hurd received an Honorable Mention for her NSF GRFP application, and even better (since the latter doesn’t actually give you the award) got the G-Rise NIH T32 fellowship which provides her with three years of stipend funding.

Not to be outdone, the undergrads are also getting recognized and funding for their research!

Margaret New received a second year of Wentz funding for her research on wild rodent hearing. She will also present her research findings from the last two years at the Wentz poster session on Friday.

Ishani Ray received the Purdie award to fund her research in the lab next year on Fragile X Syndrome and myelination.

Madeline Loosen received the Integrative Biology Dr. Raymond Dixon Scholarship in rural health in recognition for her pre-health ambitions and outstanding academic achievements.

Shay Nguyen presented their work at the Freshman Research Scholar poster session last week and did a great job!

Casey Sergott, Shay Nguyen and Emmy Fowler are going to present their work on sperm characteristics of prairie voles for both the undergraduate research symposium and Karen L Smith symposium. So grateful we have so many opportunities for undergrads to present their work!

And as it goes – what’s some good news without a few disappointments:

Dr. Reichert and I did not receive our NSF grant on tree frog auditory decision making

Sabiha and Jesse did not receive Women’s Faculty Awards

We were unsuccessful with Niblack applications for undergraduate research

As always I think it’s important to recognize the set backs with the accolades to normalize rejection and share that we don’t always get everything we apply for.

I am still pretty dang proud of everything we have accomplished and grateful for these amazing folks I can call my lab mates and mentees.