Lauren O'Connell receives New Innovator Award

Lauren O’Connell, an assistant professor of biology at Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences, received a New Innovator Award, which provides up to $1.5 million over five years to early career investigators who propose innovative, high-impact projects in the biomedical, behavioral or social sciences within the mission of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

O’Connell’s research involves using poison frogs as a new model organism to address questions related to human health. In particular, she has proposed using frogs to explore how neonates, or infants, let parents know when they are hungry.

“I’m hoping we will discover how infants communicate and how they recognize their caregivers. We know very little about how that happens,” she said.

O’Connell became interested in the topic after her first daughter was born 10 weeks early and as a result had trouble communicating as an infant. “There was no crying or communicating for food, so I became really worried that I wouldn’t know what she needed,” O’Connell said.

Being a scientist, she combed the scientific literature looking for answers, only to realize how little is known about how infant brains work. “There’s a knowledge gap, and the reason the gap is there is because no model system exists that can adequately address it,” O’Connell said.

Mice, a popular model organism in biology, are not well-suited for investigating such questions, O’Connell said, because mice pups will vocalize when they are separated from their parents, but not when they want food.

“This is not a question you can study with lab rodents,” O’Connell said. “Where our frogs come in is that the tadpoles tell their parents they’re hungry using a dance. The dance is required for their parents to feed them. It’s a behavior that encodes nutritional state.”

Frogs have another advantage in that the tadpoles are transparent. “We can follow brain development to see how having great nutrition or poor nutrition alters neonate brain development,” O’Connell said.

Her lab’s preliminary findings indicate that the genes and neuronal types responsible for the frog’s begging behaviors have human analogs associated with eating-related disorders and social communication deficits such as autism.

O’Connell said the NIH grant will allow her to hire people and buy lab equipment for the project, but more than that, it gives her freedom explore an idea that might have difficulty being funded otherwise. “This is one of the very few ways you can get a risky idea off the ground that has the potential for a high impact or to really transform a field,” she said.

O’Connell is a member of Stanford Bio-X and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute.