Lauren O'Connell (scientist)

Last updated
Lauren O'Connell
Born
Texas, U.S.
Alma mater Tarrant County College
Cornell University
Scientific career
Institutions Harvard University
Stanford University
Thesis Evolution of neuroendocrine mechanisms regulating adaptive behavior  (2011)

Lauren O'Connell is an American neurobiologist and associate professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University, specializing in the intersections of behavioral neuroscience, ecology, and evolution. [1] Her research considers how animals handle challenges in their environment. [2] She received a L'Oréal-USA For Women in Science fellowship in 2015.

Contents

Early life and education

O'Connell is from rural Texas. [3] She grew up on a goat farm in a family of six. [3] She has said that growing up on a farm and working with animals made her enthusiastic about science. [4] After high school, she attended Tarrant County College, where she earned an Associate of Arts in Natural Sciences in 2004 [5] and she spent two years before joining Cornell University. [4] At Cornell, she became interested in animal behavior from a mechanistic perspective. After completing her undergraduate degree, she moved to the University of Texas at Austin, where she studied social networks in Cichlid fish with Hans Hofmann. [4] She earned a Ph.D. in Cellular and Molecular Biology in 2011. [6] Her doctoral research explored neural and molecular mechanisms underlying social behavior in vertebrates. [7]

In 2014, she won a L'Oréal USA For Women in Science Fellowship [8] and she also won a Changing Face of STEM Mentorship award in 2016. [9]

Career

After completing her Ph.D., O'Connell was appointed a Bauer Fellow at Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences, where she established her independent research laboratory at the age of 27. [8]

In 2017, she joined the Department of Biology at Stanford University as an Assistant Professor and was later promoted to Associate Professor. [4]

At Stanford, O'Connell has continued to lead pioneering research on amphibians, focusing on the ecological and evolutionary implications of their behaviors and physiological traits. She has also played a prominent role in mentoring young scientists and promoting diversity within academia. [10]

She had become interested in the evolution of parental care in an animal clade that had a lot of variation in reproductive strategies. [4] During her postdoctoral research, she founded the “Little Froggers School Program”, a scheme which supports K–12 teachers in learning more about amphibians. [8]

Research

Her research considers genetic and environmental contributions to the behavior of poison frogs. [11] O'Connell noted that maternal behavior has only evolved once in mammals, and wanted to identify whether there were different ways to build a maternal brain. [12] She identified that mother frogs transfer their poisons to their offspring in an effort to provide some chemical defences to their young tadpoles. [12] [13] [14]

Her lab has demonstrated that poison frogs acquire their toxins from their diet, particularly from ants and mites. [15] This dietary dependency highlights the impact of habitat destruction, as declining habitat quality reduces the availability of these toxin-rich prey, diminishing the frogs' chemical defenses and increasing their vulnerability to predators. Additionally, early findings in her lab suggested that ion channel mutations could be key to poison resistance in frogs. [16]

In her work on parental behaviors, O’Connell's research has revealed that the neural circuits promoting parenting in poison frogs are similar in both males and females. [13] In species where males predominantly provide care, females can assume parenting roles when males are absent, demonstrating the plasticity of these neural mechanisms. [17] Notably, galanin neurons are particularly active in parenting behaviors in frogs, findings consistent with similar studies in mammals such as mice. [18] Her lab has also uncovered species-specific differences in the regulation of parenting behaviors, with South American and Malagasy poison frogs displaying distinct neural adaptations. [19]

Awards and honors

Selected publications

Personal life

O'Connell completed a professional training qualification in culturally aware mentorship to be able to better support students from historically marginalized groups. [3]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eugenia del Pino</span> Ecuadorian biologist

Eugenia María del Pino Veintimilla is a developmental biologist at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Ecuador in Quito. She was the first Ecuadorian citizen to be elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences (2006). She was awarded the 2019 Prize of the Latin American Society for Developmental Biology for her strong contributions to research in Ecuador, and in general to promoting Developmental Biology in Latin America.

<i>Oophaga sylvatica</i> Species of amphibian

Oophaga sylvatica, sometimes known as its Spanish name diablito, is a species of frog in the family Dendrobatidae found in Southwestern Colombia and Northwestern Ecuador. Its natural habitat is lowland and submontane rainforest; it can, however, survive in moderately degraded areas, at least in the more humid parts of its range. It is a very common frog in Colombia, but has disappeared from much of its Ecuadorian range. It is threatened by habitat loss (deforestation) and agricultural pollution and sometimes seen in the international pet trade.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Eve Marder</span> American neuroscientist

Eve Marder is a University Professor and the Victor and Gwendolyn Beinfield Professor of Neuroscience at Brandeis University. At Brandeis, Marder is also a member of the Volen National Center for Complex Systems. Dr. Marder is known for her pioneering work on small neuronal networks which her team has interrogated via a combination of complementary experimental and theoretical techniques.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jacqueline Crawley</span> American behavioral neuroscientist

Jacqueline N. Crawley is an American behavioral neuroscientist and an expert on rodent behavioral analysis. Since July 2012, she is the Robert E. Chason Chair in Translational Research in the MIND Institute and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of California, Davis School of Medicine in Sacramento. Previously, from 1983–2012, she was chief of the Laboratory of Behavioral Neuroscience in the intramural program of the National Institute of Mental Health. Her translational research program focuses on testing hypotheses about the genetic causes of autism spectrum disorders and discovering treatments for the diagnostic symptoms of autism, using mouse models. She has published more than 275 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals and 110 review articles and book chapters. According to Scopus, her works have been cited over 36,000 times, giving her an h-index of 99. She has co-edited 4 books and is the author of What's Wrong With my Mouse? Behavioral Phenotyping of Transgenic and Knockout Mice, which was very well received.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kay Tye</span> American neuroscientist (born c. 1981)

Kay M. Tye is an American neuroscientist and professor and Wylie Vale Chair in the Salk Institute for Biological Sciences. Her research has focused on using optogenetics to identify connections in the brain that are involved in innate emotion, motivation and social behaviors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frances Champagne</span> Psychologist

Frances A. Champagne is a Canadian psychologist and University Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin known for her research in the fields of molecular neuroscience, maternal behavior, and epigenetics. Research in the Champagne lab explores the developmental plasticity that occurs in response to environmental experiences. She is known for her work on the epigenetic transmission of maternal behavior. Frances Champagne's research has revealed how natural variations in maternal behavior can shape the behavioral development of offspring through epigenetic changes in gene expression in a brain region specific manner. She won the NIH Director's New Innovator Award in 2007 and the Frank A. Beach Young Investigator Award in Behavioral Neuroendocrinology in 2009. She has been described as the "bee's knees of neuroscience". She serves on the Committee on Fostering Healthy Mental, Emotional, and Behavioral Development Among Children and Youth in the United States.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vanessa Ruta</span> American neuroscientist

Vanessa Julia Ruta is an American neuroscientist known for her work on the structure and function of chemosensory circuits underlying innate and learned behaviors in the fly Drosophila melanogaster. She is the Gabrielle H. Reem and Herbert J. Kayden Associate Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology and Behavior at The Rockefeller University and, as of 2021, an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Darcy Brisbane Kelley, is an American neurobiologist and currently a Weintraub and HHMI Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University. She is also Co-Director of Columbia’s Graduate Program in Neurobiology and Behavior and Editor of Developmental Neurobiology, and well known for her contributions to neuroethology, particularly the neural control of vocalization in Xenopus and the cellular and molecular mechanisms of sexually differentiated acoustic communication.

HollisT. Cline is an American neuroscientist and the Director of the Dorris Neuroscience Center at the Scripps Research Institute in California. Her research focuses on the impact of sensory experience on brain development and plasticity.

Mala Murthy is an American neuroscientist who serves as the Director of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and is the Karol and Marnie Marcin ’96 Professor of Neuroscience at Princeton University. Her work centers around how the brain extracts important information from the sensory world and utilises that information to modulate behavior in a social context. She is most known for her work in acoustic communication and song production in courting Drosophila fruit flies. Murthy and colleagues have also published an automated system for measuring animal pose in movies with one or more animal.

Moriel Zelikowsky is a neuroscientist at University of Utah School of Medicine. Her laboratory studies the brain circuits and neural mechanisms underlying stress, fear, and social behavior. Her previous work includes fear and the hippocampus, and the role of neuropeptide Tac2 in social isolation.

Mackenzie W. Mathis, is an American neuroscientist and principal investigator at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Her lab investigates adaptive mechanisms in biological and artificial intelligence to inform adaptive AI systems and translational research.

Lisa Gunaydin is an American neuroscientist and assistant professor at the Weill Institute for Neurosciences at the University of California San Francisco. Gunaydin helped discover optogenetics in the lab of Karl Deisseroth and now uses this technique in combination with neural and behavioral recordings to probe the neural circuits underlying emotional behaviors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Erin M. Gibson</span> Glial and circadian biologist

Erin M. Gibson is a glial and circadian biologist as well as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine at Stanford University. Gibson investigates the role of glial cells in sculpting neural circuits and mechanistically probes how the circadian rhythm modulates glial biology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bianca Jones Marlin</span> American neuroscientist

Bianca Jones Marlin is an American neuroscientist and the Herbert and Florence Irving Assistant Professor of Cell Research at the Zuckerman Institute at Columbia University in New York City. Marlin studies the epigenetic mechanisms that enable trauma experienced by parents to be passed on to offspring in rodent models. Marlin's graduate work uncovered the fundamental role for the hormone oxytocin in maternal behavior, for which she was awarded the Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience for Outstanding Ph.D. thesis as well as the STAT Wunderkinds Award for her groundbreaking findings.

Ilana B. Witten is an American neuroscientist and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University. Witten studies the mesolimbic pathway, with a focus on the striatal neural circuit mechanisms driving reward learning and decision making.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kanaka Rajan</span> Indian-American computational neuroscientist

Kanaka Rajan is a computational neuroscientist in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and founding faculty in the Kempner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University. Rajan trained in engineering, biophysics, and neuroscience, and has pioneered novel methods and models to understand how the brain processes sensory information. Her research seeks to understand how important cognitive functions — such as learning, remembering, and deciding — emerge from the cooperative activity of multi-scale neural processes, and how those processes are affected by various neuropsychiatric disease states. The resulting integrative theories about the brain bridge neurobiology and artificial intelligence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hailan Hu</span> Chinese neuroscientist

Hu Hailan is a Chinese neuroscientist, professor, and executive director of the Center for Neuroscience at Zhejiang University School of Medicine in Hangzhou, China. Hu explores neural mechanisms underlying social behaviors and psychiatric diseases. She specifically explores the neural substrates of social rank and the role of neuron-glia interactions in driving depressive behaviors. Hu discovered the anatomical and molecular targets of ketamine's fast-acting antidepressant effects to be localized to the lateral habenular circuits in rodents. Hu was also the first scientist outside of Europe and America to be awarded the IBRO-Kemali Prize in over 20 years. She is also a member of the Jiusan Society.

Zoe R. Donaldson is an American neuroscientist and assistant professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. Donaldson explores the neurobiological and genetic mechanisms of social bonding and social behavior in rodents. Her work will help to elucidate how variations in genetics and circuit activity across the population predispose certain individuals to mental illness. Donaldson is a pioneer in the use of the monogamous prairie voles to study social behaviors and has been developing novel genetic tools, since her graduate work at Emory University, to study voles in the lab to better understand the neural circuits underlying pair bonding.

Lauren Orefice is an American neuroscientist and assistant professor in the Department of Molecular Biology at Massachusetts General Hospital and in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. Orefice has made innovative discoveries about the role of peripheral nerves and sensory hypersensitivity in the development of Autism-like behaviors. Her research now focuses on exploring the basic biology of somatosensory neural circuits for both touch and gastrointestinal function in order to shed light on how peripheral sensation impacts brain development and susceptibility to diseases like Autism Spectrum Disorders.

References

  1. ↑ "The Mystery Protein: Safeguarding Poison Dart Frogs From Their Own Toxins". SciTechDaily. 2023-12-26. Retrieved 2024-11-28.
  2. ↑ "Frogs in space". news.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2024-11-28.
  3. 1 2 3 "Lauren A. O'Connell | Laboratory of Organismal Biology". oconnell.stanford.edu. Retrieved 2022-07-31.
  4. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "Early career researchers: an interview with Lauren O'Connell". Journal of Experimental Biology. 220 (13): 2303–2305. 2017-07-01. Bibcode:2017JExpB.220.2303.. doi: 10.1242/jeb.163543 . ISSN   1477-9145. PMID   28679788. S2CID   4386769.
  5. ↑ "Early career researchers: an interview with Lauren O'Connell". Journal of Experimental Biology. 220 (13): 2303–2305. 2017-07-01. Bibcode:2017JExpB.220.2303.. doi:10.1242/jeb.163543. ISSN   0022-0949. PMID   28679788.
  6. ↑ "Lulu Cambronne Named 2020 Pew Biomedical Scholar | College of Natural Sciences". cns.utexas.edu. Retrieved 2024-11-28.
  7. ↑ "ORCID". orcid.org. Retrieved 2024-11-28.
  8. 1 2 3 4 admin (2014-11-10). "Harvard biologist Lauren O'Connell among winners of science fellowship". Cambridge Day. Retrieved 2022-07-31.
  9. ↑ "Changing the Face of STEM". L'Oréal. Retrieved 2024-11-28.
  10. ↑ "Toxin Sponges May Protect Poisonous Frogs and Birds From Their Own Poisons, Study Suggests". www.newswise.com. Retrieved 2022-07-31.
  11. ↑ "Society for the Study of Evolution". www.evolutionsociety.org. Retrieved 2024-11-28.
  12. 1 2 University, Stanford (2019-11-21). "Motherly poison frogs shed light on maternal brain". Stanford News. Retrieved 2022-07-31.
  13. 1 2 Jones, Benji (2021-05-26). "These frogs need poison to survive. Humans are messing with their supply". Vox. Retrieved 2022-07-31.
  14. ↑ "Why poison frogs don't poison themselves". ScienceDaily. Retrieved 2022-07-31.
  15. ↑ "Mystery solved: How poison frogs store their toxins without harming themselves". Earth.com. Retrieved 2024-11-28.
  16. ↑ "Parenting lessons from frogs and spiders | Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute". neuroscience.stanford.edu. 2023-10-23. Retrieved 2024-11-28.
  17. ↑ Giller, Geoffrey (2023-04-24). "Mysteries of the poisonous amphibians". Knowable Magazine. doi:10.1146/knowable-042423-2.
  18. ↑ Moskowitz, Nora A.; Dorritie, Barbara; Fay, Tammy; Nieves, Olivia C.; Vidoudez, Charles; 2017 Biology Class, Cambridge Rindge Latin; 2017 Biotechnology Class, Masconomet; Fischer, Eva K.; Trauger, Sunia A.; Coloma, Luis A.; Donoso, David A.; O’Connell, Lauren A. (2020-01-01). "Land use impacts poison frog chemical defenses through changes in leaf litter ant communities". Neotropical Biodiversity. 6 (1): 75–87. Bibcode:2020NeBio...6...75M. doi:10.1080/23766808.2020.1744957.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  19. ↑ Alvarez-Buylla, Aurora; Fischer, Marie-Therese; Moya Garzon, Maria Dolores; Rangel, Alexandra E; Tapia, Elicio E; Tanzo, Julia T; Soh, H Tom; Coloma, Luis A; Long, Jonathan Z; O'Connell, Lauren A (2023-12-19). "Binding and sequestration of poison frog alkaloids by a plasma globulin". eLife. 12. doi: 10.7554/eLife.85096 . ISSN   2050-084X. PMC   10783871 . PMID   38206862.
  20. ↑ Miles, Molly (27 May 2020). "2020 McKnight Scholar Awards". McKnight Foundation.
  21. ↑ Than, Ker. "Lauren O'Connell receives New Innovator Award | Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences". humsci.stanford.edu.
  22. ↑ "Lauren O'Connell". www.nasonline.org. Retrieved 2022-07-31.
  23. ↑ "Society of Behavioral Neuroendocrinology". SBN. Retrieved 2022-07-31.
  24. ↑ "Hellman Fellows Fund" (PDF). Hellman Fellows. 2020. Retrieved 2022-07-31.
  25. ↑ "Lauren O'Connell's Profile | Stanford Profiles". profiles.stanford.edu.
  26. ↑ "2019 Awardees | NIH Common Fund". commonfund.nih.gov.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.