Starting 2025 by appreciating 2024
Old and New Members
2024 was a big year for our undergrads: Su, Brandon, Richa, and Baylee who all graduated with a bachelor’s from UW! We thank them for their hard work at the SITLab and wish them the best in their future adventures!
In 2024, we also introduced two new members to the SIT Lab team:
Jenna Sanders just graduated with a BA in Psychology, was accepted into the SOAR program at UW, officially moved to Seattle, and kickstarted her career as a postbac research assistant! She is working under Mak’s mentorship to help with the alcohol project but is also in charge of an independent project looking at long-term trends in blast data to see if mortality rates fluctuate at predictable times.
Ronin Deo-Campo Vuong is a junior undergrad at UW now double majoring in biochemistry and neuroscience. He was first introduced to SIT Lab research projects through the Neuroscience Undergraduate Reading Program, wherein Monica was his mentor. After finishing the reading program with a final presentation of a paper on how gut microbiota regulate ethanol-induced depression, Ronin joined the lab to learn more about the gut-brain axis in the context of blast polytrauma.
Accomplishments
Mak was awarded an F31 from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and submitted a paper on her polysubstance project. She was also selected for the Washington Fellows Program through ASPET and traveled to DC to advocate for science funding! Through this program, she also published a policy briefing on combating homelessness in populations with substance use disorders. In December 2024 she also submitted a review article on alcohol and blast.
Jenna is learning pretty cool things like clearing and imaging brain tissue and handling mice, while also completing lots of DNA extractions and LOTS of blast data entry.
Monica passed her General Exam and officially became a Neuroscience PhD Candidate. She gave multiple talks about her research at a MIRECC meeting, a NAPE seminar, the Interdisciplinary Graduate Research Symposium, the Western Washington University Behavioral Neuroscience Program Seminar, and at Town Hall Seattle through the Engage program. She continued and started collaborations with computational biologists, microbiologists, and more through the Microbial Interactions and Microbiome Center (mim_c). In addition to working with mouse poop, and helping write the vagus nerve stimulation (VNS) paper, her work on the gut-brain axis led her to process and image the SIT Lab’s first gut tissue by modifying brain tissue clearing and lightsheet imaging protocols.
mouse ileum; red: GFAP (enteric glia), blue: cFOS
Ronin joined the lab in the summer after his sophomore year. Under Monica’s mentorship, he is learning biochemical assays including DNA extractions and ELISAs to help validate a fecal microbiota transplant method to be used as an alternative to the more stressful option of oral gavage. In October 2024, he was accepted into the UW Neuroscience major!
Bryan concluded 6 months post-blast exposure male group testing for norBNI treatment experiment, began 2 months post-blast male exposure group. Assisted in various experiments (female NorBNI treatment, TRAP mice testing, fiber photometry visualization of dopamine dynamics in striatum during operant testing, Iliff/Carlson collaborations), analyzing VNS behavioral data/ assisting with VNS paper, blast lab maintenance. MIRECC Talk
Renata started writing the long-awaited dopamine paper, started planning a new project investigating the effects of blast on reproductive health, learned fiber implantation, and celebrated her 1 year anniversary of working in the SIT lab!
It was a big year for Alyssa! She got the NSF GRFP and taught the ISB Microbiome Course. She made big progress on a literature review paper of the molecular mechanisms in which the microbiome is known to be involved (and potential mechanisms) in chronic disease. She learned entire pipelines of processing and analyzing microbiome sequencing data, and started experimenting with the Gibbons Lab pipelines and some new methods like MetaPhlAn and HumAnn 4 (new taxonomic and gene annotation tools). She got a lot more comfortable using R and began writing analysis pipelines that can be executed via command line, or from shell scripts for more high-throughput analysis. She’s almost finished the microbiome analysis for the VNS paper, creating a whole analysis pipeline in the process. She also got started on a collaboration project with Taylor Allen’s group at Tufts to study network analysis of multi-omics data eye neurodegeneration. And using a similar format to the ISB Microbiome course, she started writing more tutorials for data analysis in R (like differential abundance analysis with radEmu).
Conferences
2024 was a big conference year for the lab! Renata and Monica attended their first-ever in-person conference at Neurotrauma 2024 with the rest of the lab; Mak attended Winter Brain and ASPET; Monica won “Best Poster as Chosen by Peers” at the Joint Microbiome Research Initiative &
Pathogen-Associated Malignancies IRC Retreat.
What are you looking forward to in 2025? (Lab Edition)
Abbie: I’m excited to share more of our research and am looking forward to seeing projects come together after a lot of troubleshooting and pilot work in 2024.
Bryan: I’m excited to continue my work on the norBNI and TRAP mice projects, finish and submit the VNS paper, and go to the Conference on the Therapeutic Potential of Kappa Opioids in Pain and Addiction in Louisiana
Renata: Submit the dopamine paper, start the reproductive project
Monica: Looking forward to going up to Friday Harbor for a conference, submitting the VNS paper (which would be my first grad school paper) and my first methods publication, and finally getting to the main experiments of my dissertation. I’m also excited to co-instruct a class I created with other grad students called Microbes and Me, which will hopefully force me to get a grip on microbiology concepts related to my project that my neuroscience-trained brain sometimes struggles with.
Ronin: I’m excited to start an individual project which is something I’ve been working up towards over 2024. I’m also excited to potentially present at the UW research symposium and work at the VA over the summer more full-time, though nothing is set in stone yet.
Mak: Excited to work on revisions for two papers (Anxiety and risk-taking behavior…. and Mechanisms underlying risky…..), chair a panel at the Winter Brain Conference, dig into data analysis on my thesis project, hopefully maybe plan a defense date!!
Jenna: I get to present an extensive analysis of the data I’ve been entering at a conference in 2025! Mak and Monica have been teaching me a lot, so I’m most excited to lead more independent experiments and practice what I’ve learned. Having the blast tube back in shape will mean more projects to learn from and more opportunities for me to pick up new skills and tricks. 🙂
Alyssa: I am looking forward to finishing the VNS project and submitting that paper (which will be my first paper of grad school)! I also plan on finishing the Tufts collaboration paper over the next few months, and (hopefully) also the review. Maybe this is the year I get back into the wet lab, but we shall see. I would love to go to a conference this year, but not sure which one…
What are you looking forward to in 2025 outside the lab?
Abbie: Continuing to build my pedalboard and write and play more original music!
Bryan: Hoping to visit my friend and music collaborator in Italy, continue to put out music and play shows, and potentially move to a new apartment.
Renata: More sewing, playing music, and hiking 🙂
Monica: Growing my ice dance class that I coach on weekends, taking some more pole dancing classes, finishing the books I got two chapters into in 2024, and traveling. And perhaps this is the year I finally do a pull-up.
Ronin: My new year’s resolution is to take better care of myself 🙂 and the vibe is to be silly but still confident and appreciative.
Mak: Hopefully will be traveling to Scotland a few times, some ski trips planned in California, Oregon, and Utah; read 50 books, and continue advocating for science!!!
Jenna: I don’t often make resolutions, but I’m looking forward to cooking new things this year (while also learning how to cook along the way…) and rediscovering my hobbies after 15 years of being a devoted student. I want to try playing the harmonica, grow some carrots, make sourdough bread, and start reading good books again!
Alyssa: I am looking forward to spending more time practicing the guitar (now with an amp lol) so I can play some new favorite songs and maybe write music of my own. I also am excited to get stronger this year so I can balance longer in a handstand, and maybe achieve the splits (I’m close but the hip flexors are holding me back). I’m trying to be more consistent and deliberate with how I spend my time to have less guilt/regrets about the things I haven’t done. My biggest goal is to crack down on the cycle of procrastination/guilt so that I spend less time and energy thinking about work in my free time.