IN-LAB news
February 2025 – ARO 2025 (Orland0)
- Team 2P (everyone!) had a good showing of their work on Ca2+ imaging of evoked hair cell and afferent activity at ARO 2025, with 3 shared posters (Marina, Chris, Olivia as first authors, with prominent contributions from Dana (bundle tracking) and Doris (utricular ROI stitching))
- Marina also presented hers in the Poster Blitz
January 2025 –
- Hannah’s paper on the functional impact of Kv1.8/Kcna10 channel subunits – a collaboration with the Cullen lab at Hopkins, is in preprint on bioRxiv.
December 2024 –
- Hannah Martin’s eLife paper characterizing Kv1.8-dependent currents in type I and II hair cells is finalized as the Version of Record! A follow up on functional impact is in the works.
November 2024 –
Kazuya Ono’s eLife paper with Team Reversal (Tarchini, Kindt, Cullen labs) is finalized as the Version of Record!
Contributions of mirror-image hair cell orientation to mouse otolith organ and zebrafish neuromast function
- Selina Baeza Loya‘s thesis paper is published in Frontiers in Neurology!
Effects of transient, persistent, and resurgent sodium currents on excitability and spike regularity in vestibular ganglion neurons The volume is dedicated to the memory of Hans Straka (1961-2022), much admired and much missed, whose broad interests and many contributions in vestibular function included the question of how ion channels shape neural coding.
October 2024 –
- SfN 2024
Keith Duncan gets a tour of Hannah’s SfN poster…. while everyone else watches
- Doris Zhang, a 3rd-year Neuroscience major, joins us with a fellowship (TPCN) to work on analysis of Ca2+ signaling data from the utricle
- Dana Silvian returns for her senior thesis research on fluid jet-evoked hair bundle motion and hair bundle properties in our semi-intact utricle preparation – also supported by a TPCN fellowship
Dana (left) and Doris at SfN Chicago
September 2024 – an excellent UChicago Neuroscience retreat
Olivia Lutz
August 2024 – Chris, Marina and Ruth Anne decamp for MBL to teach in the Biology of the Inner Ear advanced research course for close to 4 weeks
Great BIE TAs finishing up – Amanda Ciana Berlingeri with Marina; Matt Sergison with Chris
May 2024 – goings and comings
- Dr. Hannah Martin now ! Just in time to embark on her Grass fellowship at MBL.
- Dana Silvian heads to Singapore for a summer research experience
- Olivia Lutz heads to SF for her fabulous Genentech summer internship
February 2024 – More congratulations to Hannah, this time for acceptance as an MBL Grass Fellow, and the prospect of a blissfully geeky summer doing novel experiments in a beautiful setting
January 2024 – Congratulations to Hannah for her paper, published at eLife as a peer-reviewed preprint: “The potassium channel subunit KV1.8 (Kcna10) is essential for the distinctive outwardly rectifying conductances of type I and II vestibular hair cells” (Martin, Lysakowski, Eatock).
Also – Happy birthday, Hannah – December 2023 (credit to Ross for Boy and the Heron themed balloons)
December 2023 – Congratulations to Dana Silvian for 2 awards for undergraduate computational research in 2024: a TPCN training award in the ‘Training Program in Theory and Computation for Next Generation Neuroscientists’ at UChicago, and an A* STAR Research Internship Award (ARIA), which will take her to Singapore for the summer.
July 2023 – Congratulations to Marina Kabirova for postdoctoral support through a research collaboration between the Eatock lab (UChicago) and the Lysakowski lab (UIC), awarded by the Chicago Biomedical Consortium (CBC)
April 2023 – Congratulations to Dr. Aravind Govindaraju for his successful thesis defense! (PhD Applied Physics Rice University; advisor Rob Raphael; Thesis: “The Vestibular Hair Cell-Calyx Model: Insights into ion channels, experimental data, and ephaptic transmission in the vestibular epithelium“)
March 2023 – Welcome to new lab member Dr. Marina Kabirova!
Marina recently received her PhD at Ariel University in Israel. Within 2 weeks of her arrival, she patch clamped utricular hair cells! (easier than getting her social security number…)
January 2023 – “Nonquantal transmission at the vestibular hair cell–calyx synapse: K-LV currents modulate fast electrical and slow K + potentials” by Aravind Chenrayan Govindaraju et al. PNAS
November 2022 – Hannah presents her work on Kv1 channels in utricular hair cells at SfN 2022; PNAS accepts our paper with the Raphael and Lysakowski labs : “Nonquantal Transmission at the Vestibular Hair Cell-Calyx Synapse: K-LV currents Modulate Fast Electrical and Slow K+ Potentials” – thanks especially to modelers Aravind Govindaraju, Imran Quraishi & Rob Raphael, for this realistic and insightful representation of a novel synapse (see the BioRxiv version from a year ago)
August 2022 – Ruth Anne and Hannah spend August teaching at the Biology of the Inner Ear course at MBL in Woods Hole – summer camp for scientists interested in inner ear systems
July 16 2022 – Kazuya departs the lab to start his new job as an Assistant Professor in Osaka University’s Department of Otolaryngology! Congratulations, Kazuya
June 4, 2022 – Kazuya Ono takes 1st place in his division in the Tohkon Classic 25 & GKJN Cup Judo championship!
May 2022 – Selina Baeza Loya successfully defends her PhD thesis! She will finish up by end of July and in September will start a postdoc on the zebrafish hearing/vestibular research model in David Raible’s group at UW (Seattle).
February – March 2022 – With the help of an MBL award, Hannah visits the Hoppa Lab at Dartmouth to follow up on a project begun in summer 2021 at MBL’s Neurobiology advanced research course
December 2021 – Toni and Omar return to Mexico City to take new academic positions – Congratulations!
November 2021 – A preprint from our collaborators, Aravind Govindaraju & Rob Raphael, shows how fast and slow forms of non-quantal transmission at the type I hair cell-calyx synapse emerge from the combined effects of the calyx shape and low-voltage activated K channels in hair cell and calyx: “A Biophysical Model of Nonquantal Transmission at the Vestibular Hair Cell-Calyx Synapse: KLV currents modulate fast electrical and slow K+ potentials in the synaptic cleft”
July 27, 2021 – Felicidades to Sonya Malavez Cajigas for her acceptance into medical school at the Ponce Health Sciences University in Puerto Rico!
July 2021 – Congratulations to Hannah for attending the Neurobiology advanced research course at MBL
July 15, 2021 – Felicidades to Toni and Omar on their publication: “The differentiation status of hair cells that regenerate naturally in the vestibular inner ear of the adult mouse” doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3127-20.2021, in collaboration with Jenny Stone, Rémy Pujol, and Connor Finkbeiner (University of Washington)
Yixing, Omar, Selina, Ruth Anne, Hannah, Kazuya, Toni: All Vaccinated and On Deck – spring 2021
April 12, 2021 – Kudos to Kazuya, who won an award for his research on striolaless mice with Doris Wu! See Ono et al., 2020
July 7, 2020 – Kudos to Kazuya for the acceptance of his second ms. with Doris Wu!
June 15, 2020 – We welcome our newest lab member, Kazuya Ono, who joins us from Doris Wu’s laboratory at NIDCD!
June 13, 2020 – Congratulations to Karolina Simcic on graduating from UChicago with an Honor’s B.S. in Neuroscience, and on admission to a Master’s in Applied Mathematics at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. We will miss you!
May 30th, 2020 – Farewell to Sonya Malavez Cajigas, after 2 years of postbaccalaureate research with us. We miss you already! Sonya is beginning a Master’s in Public Health at University of Puerto Rico’s Medical Sciences Campus.
Apr 3, 2020 – Hannah Martin received the 2020 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship – Congratulations!
Feb, 2020 – Congratulations to our colleague Anna Lysakowski (UIC) for her recognition from the Barany society at their 2020 Satellite Symposium in Granada!
Jul 31, 2019 – Selina Baeza Loya and Ruth Anne received the prestigious Gilliam Fellowship for Advanced Study through the Howard Hughes Medical Institute: Read here.
Nov 27, 2018 – Congratulations to Ruth Anne for being named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for ‘distinguished contributions’ to the field of neuroscience: Read here.
Other News
- WHO World Report on Hearing – launched March 2021