Archived Lab News
Nov 2023
Dr. Lattin published a review paper this month with Farrah Madison, Vern Bingman, and Tom Smulders on the avian hippocampus in the journal Hormones and Behavior! There is still much to learn about this brain region, especially in regards to its anatomy and stress & anxiety functions. This article was part of a special issue of Hormones and Behavior on “Contributions of comparative approaches to behavioral neuroendocrinology.”
We published a paper led by postdoctoral researcher Dr. Tosha Kelly showing that individual variation in glucocorticoid hormones did not predict avian malaria infection outcomes, but corticosterone negative feedback strengthened in infected sparrows.
Oct 2023
Aug 2023
Two new students joined the lab this month! The lab’s new PhD student, Marquise Henry, was awarded the LSU Graduate School’s prestigious Huel D. Perkins Fellowship, and Emily Stelling is a post baccalaureate researcher through the NSF RaMP funded LAGNiAppE program! Welcome Marquise and Emily!
Aug 2023
Lab Postdoctoral Researcher Dr. Tosha Kelly and PhD Candidate Keegan Stansberry presented research at the annual meeting of the American Ornithological Society, which this year was a joint meeting with the Society of Canadian Ornithologists and held in London, Ontario, Canada. They presented new work from the lab on the effects of parasites on birds, and enjoyed meeting scientists from the USA, Canada, and beyond!
Keegan Stansberry presents a project from his PhD research at the 2023 American Ornithological Society / Society of Canadian Ornithologists joint meeting in London, Ontario, Canada.
Aug 2023
LSU Veterinary Student Meridith Helms-Pack presented a poster on the summer research project she conducted in the Lattin Lab at the annual Veterinary Scholars Symposium meeting in Puerto Rico, August 3-5, 2023. She had a lively crowd and lots of interest from other attendees on possible ways to reduce stress in avian patients in a clinical setting.
Vet student Meridith Helms-Pack presents a poster on her summer research project in the Lattin Lab at the Veterinary Scholars Symposium meeting in Puerto Rico.
July 2023
Dr. Lattin and PhD student Melanie Kimball presented neophobia research at the annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society in Portland, Oregon. This was a great chance to hear about new work in the field of behavior and connect with colleagues!
Dr. Lattin gives a research presentation at the 2023 Animal Behavior Society meeting in Portland, Oregon.
PhD student Melanie Kimball gives a research presentation at the 2023 Animal Behavior Society meeting in Portland, Oregon.
July 2023
When it comes to an animal's response to novelty, context matters! The lab’s new paper in Behavioural Brain Research by PhD student Melanie Kimball and Dr. Lattin demonstrates that a fearful response towards novel objects is not correlated with exploration of a novel environment in house sparrows.
Graph showing house sparrow latency to feed with a novel object on the x axis and latency to enter a novel environment on the y axis. The two are not correlated.
June 2023
Female house sparrows exposed to breeding levels of estrogen decrease their brain responses to neutral sounds relative to the song of males of their own species, but they do NOT decrease brain responses to predator sounds. Our new paper out now in Frontiers in Physiology was the Senior Honors Thesis work of LSU undergraduate student, Distinguished Undergraduate Researcher, and Ronald E. McNair Fellow Courtney Harding! PhD student Melanie Kimball helped mentor Courtney and revised her thesis for publication; undergraduate Kaitlin Couvillion, postdoc Dr. Tosha Kelly, and PhD student Keegan Stansberry also collaborated on this project.
One of the more interesting behavioral findings from this project was that female sparrows exposed to breeding levels of estrogen ate more. Rodent research has mostly shown the opposite - high estrogen associated with lower feeding. This means that the effects of estrogen on feeding could be species specific, or might depend on whether an animal breeds seasonally or year-round.
June 2023
2023 Goldwater Scholar and Astronaut Scholar Kenedi Lynch, who studied avian malaria as an Undergraduate Researcher in the Lattin Lab.
Lab undergraduate researcher Kenedi Lynch has received 2023 Goldwater and Astronaut Scholarships, two prestigious awards that seek to identify, encourage, and financially support students of exceptional promise in STEM fields. Other than her research on avian malaria in the Lattin Lab, as a 2022 Amgen Fellow Kenedi also spent last summer doing research at Johns Hopkins University on devices that could be used to monitor blood antibiotic levels in human patients. Congratulations Kenedi!
May 2023
Congratulations to Riley Noble, who successfully defended her Senior Honors Thesis from the lab and graduated this spring! Riley and Ayushi Patel, another Spring 2023 graduate, also received Distinguished Undergraduate Researcher awards. Congratulations Riley and Ayushi!
Undergraduate lab member Riley Noble receives her Distinguished Undergraduate Researcher award from the LSU Discover program. Her Senior Honors Thesis research in the lab examined interactions between the gut microbiome and responses to avian malaria.
Undergraduate lab member Ayushi Patel receives her Distinguished Undergraduate Researcher award from the LSU Discover program. Her research in the lab used different techniques to visualize dopamine receptors in active neurons.
May 2023
Lattin Lab PhD student Melanie Kimball, who received funding from both LSU and the P.E.O. Scholars program to fund her final year of dissertation research.
PhD student Melanie Kimball received a P.E.O. Scholar Award and LSU Dissertation Year Fellowship to fund the final year of her dissertation research. This funding will allow Melanie to focus on research and prepare for post-doctoral job interviews. Congratulations Melanie!
April 2023
Undergraduate researchers Riley Noble and Kenedi Lynch gave talks and Raedan Stephens and Ayushi Patel presented posters at the LSU Discover Day undergraduate research conference highlighting their research from the lab. Everyone did an amazing job!
Lattin Lab member Raedan Stephens presents a poster on using RFID systems to study the behavior of free-living European starlings at LSU Discover Day.
Dr. Lattin congratulates lab members Kenedi Lynch and Riley Noble on their excellent talks at LSU Discover Day.
Dr. Lattin received a 5 year CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation to further investigate the role of the hippocampus in neophobia behavior (a fearful response towards new things), and to develop a new Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) lab using data from these projects. More information on this award can be found here.
March 2023
January 2023
Dr. Christine Lattin, Dr. Tosha Kelly, and PhD students Melanie Kimball and Keegan Stansberry presented talks, and undergraduate student Raedan Stephens presented a poster on research from the lab at the annual meeting of the Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology iin Austin Texas. Dr. Kelly was also awarded the 2023 Dorothy M. Skinner award, which recognizes women PhD students and postdocs who have “demonstrated outstanding scholarship and show high potential for continued excellence in research.” Congrats!
Lattin Lab members Raedan Stephens, Christine Lattin, Tosha Kelly, Keegan Stansberry, and Melanie Kimball at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Conference, January 2023.
July 2022
Dr. Lattin and Dr. Kelly attended and presented research at the International Symposium on Avian Endocrinology in Edinburgh Scotland. This meeting was an amazing opportunity to connect with scientists from around the globe who study hormones in birds!
June 2022
Dr. Lattin was interviewed by the Lab Rat Chat podcast, out as Episode 27, “The Bird is More Than the Word.”
June 2022
A paper from the lab in Behavioural Brain Research demonstrates that exposure to novel objects changes neuronal activity in several key brain regions involved in behavior in house sparrows. Most intriguingly, the back part of the hippocampus responded to novel objects while the front part did not, suggesting there may be a “caudal-rostral” axis in the avian hippocampus similar to what is seen in mammals. This project was headed by doctoral student Melanie Kimball, with help from other senior lab members and undergraduates Eve Gautreaux and Kaitlin Couvillion.
May 2022
Our paper in PLOS ONE shows that gene expression patterns (i.e., what genes are turned on or off) look very different in the brains of neophobic and non-neophobic sparrows. This work, which was done in collaboration with LSU Professor Morgan Kelly, suggests that part of what determines behavior differences may be basic differences in the amounts of different proteins, receptors, and enzymes in certain brain regions. An earlier draft of this work is also available as a preprint in BioRxiv, and this research was featured in a press release on the College of Science website.
May 2022
Undergraduate lab members Allison Cannon, Kaitlin Couvillion, and Courtney Harding all successfully defended their Senior Honors Theses from the lab, and presented their research at LSU Discover Day. Congratulations to all three!
Courtney Harding receives her Distinguished Undergraduate Researcher award.
Dr. Lattin poses with Kaitlin Couvillion and Allison Cannon at LSU Honors Graduation.
April 2022
Dr. Lattin and the lab’s research are highlighted in a nice feature story on the LSU College of Science website.
April 2022
Another collaborative microbiome project that sprang from Dr. Lattin’s PhD research has been published in the Journal of Experimental Biology! This work demonstrates that both captivity and a chronic mild stress protocol cause major changes in the types and amount of bacteria found in the house sparrow gut.
March 2022
Work out from our lab in the journal Integrative Organismal Biology finds that captivity, but not neophobia phenotype, affects the gut microbiome of house sparrows. This research was the Senior Honors Thesis of Distinguished Undergraduate Researcher Abigail Vinson, and was done in collaboration with LSU Professor Gary King.
Dr. Christine Lattin and Dr. Tosha Kelly gave oral presentations and PhD students Melanie Kimball, Keegan Stansberry and undergraduate students Allison Cannon, Kaitlin Couvillion, and Kenedi Lynch gave poster presentations of preliminary data at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in January 2022.
A new study from the lab published in the journal Hormones and Behavior shows that reducing corticosterone also reduced fearful behavior towards novel objects (neophobia) in wild house sparrows. This suggests that part of what determines an animal’s response to novelty is its background hormonal state. One post-doc, two graduate students, and three undergraduate researchers contributed to this collaborative project!
January 2022
A paper from Dr. Lattin’s postdoc is published in IEEE Transactions on Radiation and Plasma Medical Sciences. In the paper, Dr. Lattin and her coauthors used imaging data from rats, mice, and sparrows to determine how get the best quality data from small animal positron emission tomography (PET) imaging studies.
June 2021
January 2021
Dr. Christine Lattin, Dr. Tosha Kelly, and PhD student Melanie Kimball all gave oral presentations and PhD student Keegan Stansberry and undergraduate student Kaitlin Couvillion both gave poster presentations of preliminary data at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in January 2021.
August 2020
Our paper “No you go first: phenotype and social context affect house sparrow neophobia” is out in Biology Letters. We find that house sparrows can learn from other individuals to be more daring towards novel objects, demonstrating social learning in this species and suggesting that animal personality traits may be somewhat flexible. Read the press release from LSU about our findings here, and see coverage from the November issue of Natural History magazine about our work here.
May 2020
Congratulations to postdoctoral researcher Dr. Tosha Kelly, a 2020 recipient of the Life Sciences Research Foundation Fellowship for her work examining interactions between avian malaria and the physiological stress response in songbirds. Read the press release about Dr. Kelly’s award and her work here.
January 2020
Our review paper “Glucocorticoid negative feedback as a potential mediator of trade-offs between reproduction and survival” is published in General and Comparative Endocrinology. In this paper, we also showed that how researchers measure an animal’s ability to shut down the glucocorticoid response to stressors varies widely from study to study, and that this can affect results.