Principal Investigator, Extramural Fellow
National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke
National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Development of multisensory perception (Ph.D.)

For my Ph.D., I was incredibly fortunate to build the laboratory from the ground up, under the light-handed supervision of an experienced mentor with a track record of 20+ continuous years of NIH (R01) funding. My mentor, Robert Lickliter, moved from Virginia Tech to Florida International University with tenure, the year I started the program. My graduate research included mastery of basic molecular biological and immunocytochemical techniques, and my undertakings were heavily physiological, psychoacoustic, and behavioral in nature, including programming for a variety of applications (data collection, signal processing, data analysis and display) in both VisualBasic and MATLAB. Because we were rebuilding the laboratory completely anew, I had a great deal of freedom to improve upon previously established techniques. I changed embryonic heart rate recordings from invasive to non-invasive; automated, standardized, and evaluated the reliability of data collection; automated stimulus delivery to include a great many permutations of multisensory exposures; and organized testing to exclude human artifact. Also, I was heavily involved in laboratory operations, including personnel recruiting and management at a diverse institution; experimental design and troubleshooting; data acquisition, management, and analysis; and IACUC / animal husbandry. Finally, I extended collaborations between my Ph.D. research laboratory and many others, both at my home institution and elsewhere. Thus, I have had the opportunity to engage in many different techniques, research platforms, and training environments across disciplines.

All studies conducted in Bob's laboratory had conceptual underpinnings in developmental psychobiology, and investigated the effects of prenatal sensory stimulation on postnatal perception. We used bobwhite quail as an animal model for preterm infants because acoustic stimulation is easily delivered to embryos through the eggshell, and precocial birds can readily locomote immediately after hatching - affording a testable behavior for choice. Our studies showed that synchronized, multisensory stimulation can facilitate young organisms’ subsequent selective attention to identical stimulus presentations delivered through only one sense (Lickliter et al., 2006); prenatal physiological arousal affects perinatal cognition (Markham et al., 2006); and prenatal augmented auditory stimulation affects postnatal visual system function (Markham et al., 2008).

I also had the extraordinary opportunity to gain a wealth of neurophysiological experience during Neural Systems & Behavior 2005 (Marine Biological Laboratory), for which I can thank Philip Stoddard to a large degree. There I learned techniques ranging from intracellular sharp electrode recordings from leech ganglia during various types of stimulation, whole-cell patch clamp recordings from nucleus Laminaris (nL) cells in the chick auditory brainstem, in vivo disinhibition and extracellular recordings in the songbird vocal learning circuit, and rat behavioral manipulations during in vivo extracellular hippocampal place cell recordings. As such, I further developed a practical basic research understanding of the brain using converging operations at several different levels of analysis, and knowledge about the history, systems, and organisms studied from a neuroethological perspective.