ISN Newsletter - March 1999

Newsletter - March 1999

Section 2

Autobiographical Sketch: Going with the Flow
Autobiographical Sketch: I've been lucky many times over
Courses, Meetings, Workshops
Graduate and postgraduate positions

Autobiographical Sketch: Going with the Flow

Sheryl Coombs

Parmly Hearing Institute
Loyola University Chicago
scoombs@luc.edu

One of the disadvantages of being a former graduate student of Art Popper's is that when he calls upon you to write an autobiographical sketch for the ISN newsletter, it's difficult to refuse. I tried explaining to Art that I was no where near old enough nor accomplished enough to write such a sketch, but Art, who is half nudge and half proud parent, rather gleefully claimed that I was at least 10 years older than most of my female colleagues. I don't think that age by itself is a very persuasive argument (Art is much older than I am), but I do think that there is merit to the second half of Art's argument, which is that the field of neuroethology, founded and largely dominated by men, needs to identify senior women who can serve as role models for younger women. So, as one of the senior (just a smidgen under 52) women in the field, I'll try to follow through on Art's good intentions.

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan in the 60s, career options for college-educated women were certainly growing, but there were still only two commonly accepted tracks: teaching (elementary or secondary school) and nursing. Hardly a Clara Barton type, I opted for teaching and majored in biology with a secondary teaching certificate in science. Teaching jobs were scare during this Viet Nam era, however, and I found myself taking a job as a child-care worker for highly disturbed adolescent girls in a state mental institution. I'm not sure how this prepared me for my eventual career in neuroscience, except that I remember even then being interested in the biological basis of behavior and wondering why it received so little attention from the staff psychiatrists.

I lasted only 8 months in this job but as luck (or destiny) would have it, my next job was as a research assistant working for Bill Stebbins and Dave Moody in their Primate Lab at the Kresge Hearing Institute, University of Michigan. This was certainly a turning point in both my life and career. I would like to say that it was only the science that pulled me in -- hook, line and sinker -- but in point of fact, the actual research in the lab was only secondary. It was being around such motivated, bright and enthusiastic students and faculty that really sucked me in. There was an infectious esprit de corps that permeated the lab -- part social, part intellectual, and always engaging and fun. During my five years in this lab, my research skills and interests matured and my confidence grew, thanks to the encouragement of my bosses, who treated me like a colleague rather than a technician and who by then had become my very first academic mentors. As I struggle now to cultivate this kind of atmosphere for students in my own lab, I realize what a difficult task it is to be a good mentor and what a truly precious and rare commodity my experience had been.

The rest of my career path has been more or less a matter of practicality, serendipity, and a love of fish and SCUBA diving. While still employed as a research assistant, I enrolled in a UM course called Carribean Marine Environments. The capstone of the course was a SCUBA diving trip to the Grand Cayman Islands that masqueraded as a student research project. I had already learned quite a bit about hair cells of the inner ear (in fact, I destroyed them daily in noise-exposure and ototoxic drug studies) and eagerly began to pursue what was known about their function in the auditory and lateral line systems of fish. When I came across Phyllis Cahn's work on the role of the lateral line system in schooling behavior, a hopelessly naive research project was conceived and a life-long passion for the lateral line system was born.

After this first fledgling attempt at underwater field research and the slow realization that I had my own research agenda to pursue, it was only a matter of time before I was off to graduate school at the University of Hawaii to work with one of the few experts in the world on fish hearing -- Art Popper. Or so I thought. Almost like ships passing in the night, Art and I caught brief glimpses of one another for the first time when Art, traveling from Hawaii, arrived at the Kresge Hearing Institute for a year-long sabbatical and crashed my going-away party just before I left for Hawaii. An unusual beginning to a life-long friendship and collaboration.

When Art changed jobs three years later and moved from Hawaii to Georgetown University in Washington, DC, I followed him and extended my thesis research on comparative hearing abilities in marine squirrelfishes to freshwater osteoglossomorphs. One of the highlights of my Georgetown experience was becoming friends with Catherine McCormick and Mark Braford, who taught me most of what I know about the central neuroanatomy of fish octavolateralis systems. I particularly remember our yearly Fourth of July pilgrimage to the west lawn of the While House to see the fire works and listen to the National Symphony play the William Tell overture.

Although my formal training as a graduate student was in zoology, I spent many of my pre-and postgraduate years hanging out with psychologists -- a split-brain experience consistent with neuroethology's roots. One of these psychologists was Dick Fay, who took me under his wing during my postdoc years at the Parmly Hearing Institute and turned me into a bona fide neurophysiologist -- one that he could never get rid of! Dick graciously shared his lab space with me for nearly 18 years before I got a tenured position and my own lab in the same institute. He also taught me many other things, not the least of which was how to use a drill press, tap and dye set, and band saw. Machine shop classes were never an option for me in high school, but in my early thirties, these first lessons from Dick meant that I could now build what ever esoteric apparatus I might need for my experiments. Indeed, the sheer diversity of things I find myself doing in this line of work -- whether it be building equipment, computer programming, collecting and analyzing data, seining for fish, writing papers, giving talks, traveling to exotic places or meeting and talking with fascinating people -- is to me one of the real blessings and joys of a career in research.

Perhaps one of my proudest accomplishments over the last 20 years has been the coorganization, with Peter Görner and Heinrich Munz, of a 1987 conference on the Mechanosensory Lateral Line and the book that followed. I think that most of us can still remember what it felt like as students to meet for the very first time someone whose papers we had read and whose contributions we had admired. This conference was like that for me. I felt like a kid in a candy store. Never before and not since then, have I had the pleasure of being with so many people who shared my passion for the lateral line system. It was also very gratifying to know that I followed in the footsteps of Phyllis Cahn, whose work had introduced me to the lateral line system and who had organized the very first lateral line conference 20 years ago.

One of the most delightful outcomes of the 1987 conference was meeting John Montgomery, a funny-sounding kiwi (New Zealander) who had just published a paper in Science on planktonic prey detection by the lateral line system of an antarctic fish. It wasn't too long after this that I and Loyola colleague John Janssen joined him in Antarctica to examine the functional consequence of morphological variation in the lateral line system of notothenioid fishes. This was a unique opportunity to visit a truly awesome place and to study morphological diversity in a monophyletic radiation of fishes geographically and thermally isolated for around 50 million years. Our findings -- that there could be a lot of morphological "slop" without significant effects on the frequency response properties of peripheral lateral line fibers -- were not what we expected, but exciting nonetheless. They also launched a highly enjoyable and productive collaboration between Montgomery and myself that continues now into its 11th year despite the geographic isolation from each another.

I think that one of the primary reasons that the lateral line engages so much of my interest and that of my colleagues is that it's one of the oldest and least understood of all vertebrate sensory systems. At least a part of the mystery stems from the fact that as humans we don't possess a lateral line or anything like it and thus, don't even have a verb (e.g. see, hear, feel etc.) to describe what it does. To remedy this shortcoming and to honor Sven Dijkgraaf for his beautiful contributions to the field, Chris Platt once wrote a lovely little poem suggesting that we use the word "sven" for this purpose. One of the primary research goals of my lab today is to try to visualize with 3-D computer graphics what it is that fish might sven with their lateral line when detecting water flows. Towards that end, we have taken advantage of a discovery made years ago by John Janssen -- that Lake Michigan mottled sculpin respond to both real and artificial (vibrating sphere) prey with an unconditioned, naturally-occurring orienting and approach behavior that disappears in blinded fish when the lateral line system is blocked. We are currently working very hard to sven as best we can by combining anatomical, behavioral, physiological and computer modeling techniques to describe how excitation patterns along the lateral line sensory surface change as mottled sculpin approach their prey.

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Autobiographical Sketch: I've been lucky many times over

Masakazu Konishi

California Institute of Technology
konishim@its.caltech.edu

On September 8, 1958, I landed in Seattle with a borrowed 50 dollars in my pocket. Our boat was carrying 150 Japanese students who were heading for US universities and some 30 US high school students on their way home from 3 months in Japan. One day we Japanese young men and American girls got together to talk. The girls thought that they should give us American names so that they could call us more easily. I suggested Mark for me because my Japanese name Masakazu contained M, A, and K. The girls liked it. I volunteered to perform in the talent show that the American kids organized for the whole ship. I imitated animal vocalizations including turkey, cat, dog, pig, horse, goat, and sheep. I received a prize for my performance. As a child, I enjoyed fooling animals. When I read The Study of Instinct by Niko Tinbergen in 1953, my junior year in college, I thought I found a perfect field for me. You get paid and praised for fooling animals with dummies. Before I left Japan, the chairman of the zoology department at Berkeley had written me that an ethologist named Peter Marler was on the faculty. I had read his seminal paper "Some characteristics of animal calls." I immediately wrote him asking if I could join his group. Shortly after I settled in the International House in Berkeley, Peter and his beautiful wife Judith came over to take me out for dinner. I thought Judith resembled Vivian Leigh in Gone with the Wind I knew a few Americans in Sapporo where I went to college. The Marlers were the first English people I met.

I was very lucky to work under Peter, because he was one of the two European-trained ethologists in America. Although neither ethology nor birdsong research was new to me, learning from a leader was very different from learning from books. My first research project was to determine the acoustic properties of song that were essential for species recognition. This project was possible because the first portable tape recorder became available. I did not, however, continue this project because the seasonal nature of territorial behavior slowed its progress. I also did not have enough time to do research while taking courses and working as a teaching assistant. In my third year or so, I seriously thought about a new project. It was the time when ethologists and some American psychologists were bitterly quarreling about instinct. Also, the central pattern generator was a hot issue among early neuroethologists. I thought that I should investigate if birds deafened in youth could develop normal vocalizations. Johann Schwartzkopff of Germany had developed a method of deafening birds in 1949. I initially developed my own method of deafening for chickens and adopted his for small birds. Most biological hypotheses require positive results. You look for something and if you don't find it, you prove nothing. I could not lose with my deafening experiments because both negative and positive results would be informative. I did get negative results with chickens and positive results with songbirds. The deaf chickens developed normal vocalizations, whereas all deaf songbirds developed abnormal songs.

In 1963 when I obtained my doctorate, I had to leave the country because I had a J-1 visa. Since I had no intention of returning to Japan, I had to find another country. The Japanese university was modeled after the Prussian one. Despite the post war democratization of Japan by America, the university remained basically unchanged. I read some old German zoology textbooks when I was in college. So, I thought of going to Germany. Since I wanted to learn more about hearing in birds, I chose Schwartzkopff as my sponsor. I was fortunate enough to attend my first International Congress of Ethology in Leiden. At that time, all participants heard all speakers in a big room. Peter was generous enough to ask another student and me to present our work at the congress. I was a little bit scared when I stood at the podium seeing great men like Lorenz and Tinbergen in the audience. After my talk, Otto Koehler asked me if I would publish my deafening results in "his" journal Zeitschrift fuer Tierpsychologie. I was too flattered to decline the invitation. John Emlen of University of Wisconsin asked me if I was interested in an assistant professor position there. There was a time when publications and jobs could be arranged in this way!

Having met many German ethologists at the congress, I was quite comfortable in Germany. My first stop was the Max-Planck Institute in Seewiesen. I gave a talk at Juergen Aschoff's home where I stayed for a few days. When he heard me say "template," he stopped me and offered a German translation "Sollmuster." The literal translation of this is "Must pattern" and that is exactly what I meant by template. Later I used this term in the German abstract of the article I published in Koehler's journal. Koehler praised me for the right choice of word. I went to Tuebingen where Schwartzkopff had his laboratory. After seeing the Max-Planck Institute, I was astonished to see the poor state of university laboratories. I thought for a moment that I made a mistake by coming to Germany. I stayed a few months in Tuebingen and moved to the laboratory of Otto Creutzfeld at one of the Max-Planck Institutes in Munich. My colleague and I had an ambitious plan to map the visual receptive fields of neurons in the cat's visual cortex by intracellular methods. This project did not go far because we could not hold cells long enough to map their receptive fields. Despite these failures, my stay in Germany was very beneficial because I got to know some of the leading ethologists and promising young people who were to become leading neuroethologists. I became so familiar with Seewiesen that Lorenz regarded me as a member of the institute. I went there often to see Walter Heiligenberg. Walter and I spoke only German since then until his tragic death.

After two years in Germany, I took the assistant professor position arranged by John Emlen. I liked Madison but decided to take another position at Princeton University. I was fascinated by the talk of Roger Payne, another young speaker at the Leiden congress. I thought that some day I would study the neural mechanisms of sound localization in barn owls. I did not have to wait long before I got my first baby barn owls. Two of them bred the following year and by the end of that year I had 21 owls. However, a systematic physiological study began in 1976, a year after I moved to Caltech. While I was waiting for the large anechoic room that was to be assembled in my laboratory, I worked on the owl's visual Wulst with Jack Pettigrew. After one year of exciting research with Jack, he asked me what I was going to do with the auditory system. Since I was impressed by the selectivity of visual neurons for space, I told him that I would like to map the spatial receptive fields of auditory neurons. He enthusiastically endorsed this idea and paid for the necessary instruments to be built by the legendary designer and machinist Herb Adams. The idea was to deliver sounds from various directions to plot the distribution of neuronal responses in space. About this time, Eric Knudsen asked me if he could join me as a postdoc. Eric and I met in a café or humburger joint in Manhattan to discuss our project. When he asked me what I was looking for, I answered "a map of auditory space," because the owl can rapidly pin point sound sources as if it were using a look-up table. Eric said that he would expect a map without any reason. We were naive and ignorant because we did not know Arnold Starr's review in which he pointed out that neither spatial receptive field or maps should exist in the auditory system because space is not mapped in the inner ear.

We did find neurons with spatial receptive fields first in the forebrain auditory area. We could not, however, recognize any map of auditory space. Eric suggested that we go to the inferior colliculus. Since we could not afford to kill an owl to make a brain atlas, we used the head of a frozen owl. We cut it with a band saw and look at unstained sections to determine the coordinates of the inferior colliculus. In the first multiunit recording, we saw a cluster of neurons responding only to sound coming from a particular direction. As I was leaving for somewhere, Eric continued to record further. He later reported to me that the preferred sound direction changed systematically as he moved the electrode. We worked very hard for about three months to find a map of auditory space. Eric and I celebrated this occasion with a bottle of champagne.

Since this discovery I have been fortunate to sponsor several excellent postdocs in pursuing the mechanisms by which the receptive fields are created. Today we know the anatomical pathways and neural processes involved in the genesis of receptive fields. Despite this success, I feel that I should return to the true spirit of neuroethology, that is, to work with behaving animals. My new adventure is to record neural activities with chronic electrodes in behaving owls.

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Courses, Meetings, Workshops

The 1999 Annual Meeting of the Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology will be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, June 26 to 30 1999. In addition to contributed papers, the meeting will include invited symposia on mechanisms of sexual differentiation of brain and behavior, HPA axis and the regulation of species typical behaviors, estrogen and aging, functional neuroanatomy of reproductive circuits, and environment and hormone behavior interactions. Further information is available on the SBN website (http://www.sbne.org).

Tropical Neuroethology Undergraduate Summer Program, University of Puerto Rico. A hands-on program in Tropical Neuroethology for advanced undergraduate students. Methods will include: field observations, underwater photography, electrophysiological recording (intracellular, extracellular, and chronic), dye injection of neurons, nerve backfills, immunohistochemistry, neuronal cell culture techniques, and confocal microscopy. July 19th - August 20th 1999, Institute of Neurobiology, San Juan PR. Students will receive housing, funds for travel, and a stipend (NSF support). Course credit may be arranged through student's home university. Contact: Dr. Mark W. Miller, Institute of Neurobiology, 201 Blvd del Valle, San Juan, PR 00901. Tel: (787) 724 1024; E-mail: M_MILLER@rcmaca.upr.clu.edu. Application information: www.neurobio.upr.clu.edu/neuroethology-98

Workshop on Biology, Mechanics and Theory of Walking (WS6, Detroit, Michigan; May 15, 1999) at the International Conference of Robotics and Automation (May 10 to15, 1999): This workshop will place an emphasis on locomotion, an area that crosses many disciplines: neurobiology, biomechanics, robotics, mechanics, and mathematics. To foster the growth of interdisciplinary interactions, the workshop will bring together highly renowned scientists from various disciplines and stimulate interdisciplinary discussion regarding their different viewpoints on the same problems. Speakers from various disciplines will present a series of talks that will be followed by an active time of discussion led by the presenters, but also participated in by the workshop attendees. Speakers: Keir Pearson, Holk Cruse, Martin Fischer, Randall Beer, Martin Buehler, Claire Farley, Art Kuo. Information: Dr. William Schwind, Dr. Erich Staudacher, University of Michigan, Advanced Technology Laboratories, 1101 Beal Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109 2110, Phone: 1 734 764 5154, Fax: 1 734 763 1260, e mail: schwindw@eecs.umich.edu, staud@eecs.umich.edu

Friday Harbor Laboratories, Neurobiology course, May 3 to June 5, 1999. An intensive course in neurobiology and behavior with emphasis on channel concepts/techniques, intracellular electrophysiology and in vitro culture studies of neural circuitry, actions of neurons, and peptides important for development and behavior of diverse animals. Laboratory training will focus on neuron dissection and in vitro culture techniques (2 weeks in the Calgary laboratory of N. Syed), followed by 3 weeks at FHL engaged in electrophysiological, immunofluorescence, and behavioral work. The course involves daily lectures, extensive laboratory experience (10+ hours per day), and weekly research projects. Intertidal and shipboard field trips will introduce participants to the rich and diverse fauna of the Pacific Northwest region. Prerequisite: permission of faculty. Financial aid to qualified students is possible from grants provided by the Grass Foundation and University of Washington. Applications will be accepted until the course is full. For information see www.fhl.washington.edu, or willows@fhl.washington.edu, or the Director, Friday Harbor Laboratories, 620 University Road, Friday Harbor WA 98250. Grass Foundational Post Doctoral Fellowships in Neuroscience. Support will be provided to a few post-doctoral Grass Fellows in Neuroscience with research projects of 2 to 4 months duration in Spring, Summer and Autumn quarters at University of Washington's Friday Harbor Laboratories. Travel, room and board, laboratory and collecting fees, research related expenses and a $1000/month stipend are paid from a generous gift from the Grass Foundation. Scientists from the former Soviet Union are also encouraged to apply. Application to the Director of FHL should be made in the form of (a) a brief, (b) a letter of reference from someone familiar with the training and research of the applicant, and (c) an Application for Research Facilities (in FHL Bulletin or www.fhl.washington.edu). Applications should be received by March 15 for appointments to be announced on April 1.

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Graduate and postgraduate positions

Postdoctoral Position is immediately available in my laboratory at the Univ. of Virginia for a period of two years, with the possibility of one additional year. The successful applicant will be expected to contribute to an ongoing program of electrophysiological research on the functional organization of central olfactory pathways in crayfish. Candidates must have a strong background in electrophysiological recording and stimulating techniques, including experience with both sharp and patch electrodes. Please send curriculum vitae, resume of research experience, and names of three references to: Dr. DeForest Mellon, Dept. of Biology, Gilmer Hall, Univ. of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22903. E-mail: dm6d@virginia.edu.

Postdoctoral position available to study auditory scene analysis and perceptually guided behavior, using the echolocating bat as a model system. Current research projects focus on the perceptual and neural mechanisms supporting spatial behavior, and our newest experiments involve extracellular recordings in the awake, vocalizing bat. Laboratory facilities include a large flight room for behavioral studies, extracellular recording and microstimulation booth, ultrasound recording and playback systems, high speed digital video cameras, surgery and histology rooms. We participate in the Comparative and Evolutionary Biology of Hearing Training Program at the University of Maryland, and possibilities exist for collaborative research with other laboratories. Background in extracellular recording and/or neuroanatomical techniques preferred. For more information, visit our Web site: http://www.bsos.umd.edu/psyc/batlab. Send CV, statement of research interests and names of three references to Cynthia Moss, Department of Psychology, Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, or by E-mail to cmoss@bss3.umd.edu.

Postdoctoral Position available in the lab of Dr. Benedikt Grothe at the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology, Munich/Martinsried, Germany. The position is connected to the DFG funded research program on Auditory Objects" at the zoology departments of the two Munich universities and the Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology. The Lab at the Max Planck Department studies neurophysiological mechanisms of temporal processing and their development in gerbils and bats. The position will be available starting November 1, 1999. Please contact: Dr. Benedikt Grothe, Max Planck Institute for Neurobiologie, Am Klopferspitz 18a, 82152 Marinsried, Germany, E-mail: bgrothe@neuro.mpg.de.

Postdoctoral Position: An established laboratory seeks a recent Ph.D. in neuroscience or related discipline with an interest in complex sound processing in the mammalian auditory system and/or echolocation. Experiments involve single-unit neurophysiological recordings from extralemniscal nuclei in the auditory thalamus, midbrain, and brainstem of awake mustached bats. Research focuses on a pathway specialized for processing frequency modulated sounds. A strong background in single unit recording and in modern fluorescent and/or immunocytochemical tract tracing techniques is especially desirable. The University of Rochester has a diverse and growing neuroscience community especially strong in auditory, visual, vestibular, and sensorimotor research. Support is available for up to three years, beginning in July 1999. Send CV, a statement of interest, and 3 letters of recommendation to: William E. O'Neill, Ph.D., Dept. of Neurobiology & Anatomy, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, Rochester, NY 14642. E-mail: william_oneill@urmc.rochester.edu.

Pre and Postdoctoral Postions in Comparative and Evolutionary Biology of Hearing at the Univ. of Maryland, College Park. This program brings together 11 faculty investigators with a common interest in auditory neuroscience. Support is provided through an NIH training gran. Faculty include: C. E. Carr (development of hearing); R. J. Dooling (comparative psychophysics); S. Gordon-Salant (speech perception); W. S. Hall (anatomy and development of the auditory CNS); C, R. Moss (auditory information processing and sensorimotor integration); D, Poeppel (neural basis of speech perception); A. N. Popper (comparative auditory mechanisms); J. C. Presson (development and regeneration of hair cells); S. Shamma (computation in auditory systems), D. Yager (physiological mechanisms of hearing), and F-G. Zeng (psychoacoustics and cochlear implants). For future information contact Dr. A. N. Popper ap17@umail.umd.edu) or visit www.life.umd.edu/cebh. The Univ. of Maryland is an equal opportunity, affirmative action employer. Minorities and women are particularly invited to apply.