Soon to be available is a great Current Biology paper in collaboration with Coen Elemans and David Perkel describing how mice produce their ultrasonic vocalizations. I’ll add the link when it is available. Way to go, Elena!

After a rapid turn around from Hearing Research, our second paper on dopaminergic projections to auditory structures is published!

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27620513

Elena and Mickey both won awards at the WSU Vancouver Research Showcase on April 14. Elena gave a great talk on her project about distortion products and Mickey presented a great poster about her duration-tuned neurons. Congrats to both of you!

Jeff and Matt also gave great presentations. Great job to all of you for representing the fabulous research projects we have going on in the lab.

I also have to note that out of 12 awardees, our Neuro hallway is home to 5 of them! Great job hall-mates!

Phil made WSU Vancouver proud by winning the system-wide WSU 3 minute thesis contest held in Pullman March 22. After being ignored more than once by our Pullman colleagues about Vancouver’s involvement in the contest, Phil showed Pullman that Vancouver knows how to talk about research!! Way to go, Phil and thanks Alli Coffin for helping our students learn so much about public speaking!!

Way to go, Elena. Matt and Jeff also gave great talks!

Nevue et al. (2016) describes the source of dopamine into the auditory midbrain. Beautiful images, Alex!

Read the paper here

We may have some pregnant bats! This would be awesome as we are getting geared up to test whether bats are vocal learners or not. Marcela and Matt are both interested in experimental and genomic studies of vocal learning in bats. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that pups show up some day soon!

Finally, our paper showing that there is selectivity to vocalizations in the dorsal cochlear nucleus has been accepted by Frontiers in System Neuroscience. This has been a long process!

Exciting things have been happening in the lab recently. Cameron and Alex both graduated and are now full time technicians!

New graduate students have joined the lab. Jeff Hoyt came over from Pullman in Jan. 2015, Matt Lambert joined the lab in Sept. 2015 and Chad Hoxeng came back to finish his MS after a long hiatus.

Our long time programmer, Amy, moved on to a different job in Portland but we gained Joel, a recent WSUV computer science graduate.

And we have a new postdoc! Marcela just arrived in September. I think she may know more about bats than I do after growing up in Costa Rica!

We’re writing papers and grants and collecting LOTS of data.