In the “Research Matters” series, we visit labs across campus to hear directly from Stanford scientists about what they’re working on, how it could advance human health and well-being, and why universities are critical players in the nation’s innovation ecosystem. The following are the researcher’s own words, edited and condensed for clarity.

The organismal biology lab studies the neural basis of family relationships, including pair bonding between mates and parent-offspring interactions. We study how the brain supports these relationships – how you recognize who your mom is or who your baby is. How an infant communicates that they need something from their parents. How parents team up to provide care for offspring, and how they coordinate that effort. What we’re hoping to understand, using a simple system, is how the brain supports communication and bonding in family relationships. 

I started my own lab at Harvard with a fellowship for high-risk, high-reward science to establish poison frogs and other amphibians as a model system for behavior and physiology. I wanted to study paternal care and there wasn’t a really good laboratory model for looking at how the presence of fathers changes family dynamics from a neuroscience perspective. I wanted a system where dads play a really important role in family dynamics and care, but where the brains are very simple.

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Male involvement in offspring care is very common in amphibians, and frogs share a lot of the same neurons and genes that are important in behavior in mammals. We have a frog colony on campus, and when we’re looking at family relationships, we have cameras monitoring family interactions, and these are scored. And then we can start to understand how parents work together to care for their tadpoles and how often they feed them. Then we can take samples to look at what kinds of neurons are reinforcing family interactions. 

We have an NIH grant to study an autism-related gene in tadpoles and how it regulates communication, and then, when that gene kind of breaks, how that influences how infants communicate to their parents and how it changes the relationship dynamics. 

What’s nice about the tadpoles is that they have a very simple, streamlined brain, so we can look at the basic building blocks of communication and bonding from an infant perspective, and then understand what happens when you have mutations in certain genes that align with human diseases. We need to understand how something works before we can understand how it breaks.

I think one of my most important jobs is to teach the next generation of doctors and scientists and engineers. We have people at every stage of their training in the lab – five undergraduates, both from Stanford and from local community colleges, eight graduate students, and four postdocs. In industry, you’re getting scientists who are already trained, and usually very focused on one task. At Stanford, you’re mentoring people on their projects, and they can be incredibly creative in that process because it doesn’t have to be application or technology focused. It’s a special place that encourages basic science, which is very difficult to get funded in industry, but it’s the foundation on which all of industry rests. 

Basic science might not have an immediate application or technology outcome, but it is often the foundation on which all of these technology applications are built. 

A lot of the technologies and applications and health care that people rely on are built on training people how to think critically and how to take the best approaches towards answering difficult questions. This is one of our main jobs at a university, and this is not something that industry or a nonprofit will be able to fill the gap in.