NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2021: Testing rules of life for developmental trade-offs in sensory and cognitive systems

Strobel, Sarah Mckay, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2021, Integrative Research Investigating the Rules of Life Governing Interactions Between Genomes, Environment and Phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the Fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. Development involves growth of the body and differentiation into specialized tissues. In response to early-life stress, organisms - from plants to insects to mammals - face trade-offs between developmental speed and specialization. Maturing at a faster rate may help organisms escape environmental stress but creates trade-offs with other traits that are important for survival such as body size, limb formation, and immune-system function. This research explores how accelerated growth impacts neural and cognitive development, which is critical for animals to accurately respond to beneficial cues and threats in their environments. Since developmental pathways and decision-making brain regions are shared across vertebrates, the Fellow’s research will be a major step forward for identifying mechanisms that mediate trade-offs between growth and differentiation. The Fellow will develop new, web-based activities to distribute material to a diverse audience and work with Native American students to incorporate frog-centric narratives that lend cultural and historical relevance to lesson plans. The Fellow will build networks across two research labs at Utah State University (USU) and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to examine if sensory and cognitive phenotypes in anurans are stable or flexible in response to accelerated development. The Fellow will manipulate developmental timing in three distantly-related species of anurans to assess trade-offs in morphology, locomotion, sensory perception, and cognition, and then link trade-offs to underlying neuromolecular mechanisms and gene-expression patterns. This research will reveal how developmental plasticity manifests across levels of biological organization, how these patterns evolve or are maintained across diverse taxa, and how these phenomena influence the resiliency of species and communities to ecosystem changes. An additional component of the project is expansion to northern Utah K-12 schools by the Froggers School Program which brings hands-on, question-based learning experiences to local classrooms. The Fellow will also partner with established programs that specialize in student retention, completion, and inclusion at USU by mentoring students in undergraduate-led research and outreach projects that match students’ career goals. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.