A mid-summer's lab dinner

This summer, the Shaughnessy Lab has 6 people working in the lab on research assistantships: all 5 graduate students and 1 undergraduate student. We were able to get the whole lab (and partners/spouses) together for dinner at our house.

Welcome to a fellow New Englander, Susanne Hahs!

Susanne Hahs is joining us for an M.S. after recently graduating from Boston College. She will be working on the functional evolution of receptors in the HPI axis.

Susanne was originally supposed to be joining us as an NSF RaMP Fellow and work in the lab as a full-time researcher for the next year. However, our multi-year NSF RaMP Program grant in the department was abruptly terminated. The reach of these historic cuts to science is enormous, and even our labs here in the more conservative-leaning states and public universities are being hit hard as well. The NSF RaMP Program was a highly impactful program for training the next generation of scientists, and our program has brought many jobs to Stillwater. It has been sad to see it end too early.

Luckily, we were still able to take Susanne on as a graduate student. I am thrilled to have someone in the lab working on receptor evolution! So, we will be firing back up the luciferase reporter gene assay that I used to run a lot at the University of Denver as an NSF Fellow. We are really starting to assemble lots of different tools in the lab now.

NASCE in Québec City, Canada

Allison and I traveled to Québec City for the North American Society of Comparative Endocrinologists meeting. It was wonderful bringing a student along to a conference. The science and socializing were fantastic, as they always are at NASCE. The poutine was... interesting, as it always is in Quebec. We brought home lots of good ideas. Of course, I brought back some maple-flavored lollipops for my toddler at home.

Happy Undergraduate Research Week!

We had many undergraduate poster presentations this year. Kristine and Conner both presented their posters at the 2025 OSU Undergraduate Research Symposium at the ConocoPhillips Alumni Center. They will also be presenting at the Karen L. Smith Undergraduate Symposium hosted by our department in Life Sciences West next week.

Additionally, Savannah capped off her prestigious year-long Wentz Research Scholarship with a presentation at the Wentz Research Symposium in the Student Union Ballroom.

Good job, all!

New papers published in J Exp Biol and J Mol Endocrinol

We had two papers come out recently — one in Journal of Experimental Biology on the unique molecular mechanisms of ion secretion in the sea lamprey gills, and one in Journal of Molecular Endocrinology on melanocortin signaling and the HPI axis in sea lamprey.

I've never published in J Mol Endocrinol before. It’s always fun to publish in a new journal. Check them out!

Welcome to the Lab, Madison!

Madison Merideth is joining our lab as an M.S. student. She received her B.S. from here in the Department of Integrative Biology at OSU and was conducting undergraduate research in the McCullagh Lab.

She will be pioneering some of the graduate-level CF work in the lab. We'll be putting together a project to identify a novel GPCR-mediated pathway for CFTR activation on the airway epithelium.

The lamprey have arrived!

It wouldn't be a Shaughnessy Lab without some lamprey. We've got the anadromous strain joining us from the Connecticut River in Massachusetts (thanks to our collaborator Amy Regish at the USGS Conte Lab) and from Hammond Bay Biological Station in Michigan (thanks to several folks there).

Welcome to Ava Cannizzaro!

I am very excited to have Ava join our lab from the University of Denver. She will be putting together a project to follow up with my work characterizing the molecular mechanisms of the SW-type ionocyte in the lamprey gills.

Fun fact: Ava was a student of mine in the 'Physiological Systems' class I taught at DU while I was an NSF Fellow there.

Recapping 2024

What a year 2024 was... the new lab is coming together, and I thought I should start logging this adventure.

In the spring, I had my first undergraduate students at OSU join me in the lab and it was a blast. Their presence really helped us get going on some of the basic molecular biology assays we have going on in the lab.

In the summer, I attended the International Congress on the Biology of Fish in Ann Arbor, MI. This has always been my favorite conference. Now that I am the treasurer of the AFS Physiology Section (the society that puts on ICBF), the conference is a bit more work, but still great fun. The science is always good! Also, in the early Fall, I attended the International Symposium on Fish Endocrinology in Baltimore, MD. What fun!

In the Fall, Allison DeLoache (B.S., Clemson Univ; M.S., Southeastern LA Univ) and Dillon Flowers (B.S., Weber St Univ; M.S. UT Tyler) joined the lab as PhD students after completing their Master's degrees elsewhere. Allison will be working on environmental and chronic stress physiology, and already has a project lined up with ODWC to compare thermal tolerance of introduced and native smallmouth bass. Dillon will be working on intestinal ion transport processes in the intestine of marine fishes (including, of course, sea lamprey).

Also in the Fall, we had our first arrivals of Atlantic killifish (Fundulus heteroclitus) to the lab. They are from New Hampshire, and hardy New Englanders like me.

Still trying to track down some lamprey for the lab...

Of course, we got out some grant proposals in to the GLFC, NSF, and NIH (none were funded), and we also got out some papers (though this was probably my lowest-productivity year in a while... everyone tells me it will be this way at the beginning, but it is still unsatisfying). We do have some exciting papers in review now, set to come out early next year.

So, it's on to next year!