Welcome to the lab, Gebran Hammoud and Guowei Zhang! Gebran is a sophomore with a Mathmatics major. Guowei is a psychology major with an interest in Behavioral Neuroscience. We are excited to have both of them join the lab this semeter.

At the Beckman fellowship poster session, Liz Soellner presented her poster "Auditory sensitivity and seizure susceptibility in rat models of Autism Spectrum Disorders". Her summer project as a Beckman Institute Undergraduate Fellow, which she will continue to work on aims to examine  seizure susceptibility in rat models of autism. She hopes this work will help to increase translatability of drug screening methods for ASD treatments.

Dr. Ben Auerbach has a new editorial on Neural markers of sensory processing in development out now in the Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience.

Haichao Wang will be continuing his excellet work with the lab as a technician. In addition, he will also be joining the U of I Bioengineering Master's program this fall.

Peter Sun is joining us from University of California, Santa Barbara. He previously worked in Joel Rothman's lab to assay gravitaxis behavior in C. elegans.

The Auerbach lab is excited to have several new undergraduates joining us this summer: Komal Kaur, Arjun Vaidya, Cryus Fallah, Ella Scortino, Andrew Jo and Luna Morales. Komal is staying this summer after graduating to help out in the lab. Cyrus and Andrew are MCB majors, Ella is a Psych and Behavioral neruoscience double major, while Arjun is a Physics major with an MCB minor. Ella is a high school student from Urbana High School.

We are greatful to have everyone's support.

Big congratulations to Haicho Wang, who has been selected for the C. Ladd Prosser Outstanding Achievement Award from the Molecular & Integrative Physiology. We look forward to his senior thesis Analyzing Circuit Disruption in Rat Autism Models of FXS and TSC using ABR and Behavior. Sarika Kumar was awarded Outstanding for her poster in the Cells and Molecules section at the 2023 UGRS. Liz Soellner obtained a Campus Honors Program Summer Research Grant and an MCB SURF award for her project on seizure susceptibility in rat models of autism.  Laurel Hart got an MCB SURF award for this summer to look at plasticity during development!

While we are sad to see them go, we are excited to see what our amazing students will achieve.

• Haichao Wang is headed to the U of I Bioengineering masters program and will continue with us as a technician

• Zaria George is off to the University of Illinois Chicago Neuroscience Graduate Program

Both Haicho Wang and Sarika Kumar presented their indepenant projects at the 2023 Undergrad Research Symposium.

Sarika presented her summer SURF and Beckman Fellowship project on Auditory Behavioral Differences in Genetically-distinct Rat Models of Autism Spectrum Disorders, while Haichao talked about his thesis work on Analyzing Auditory Circuit and Perceptual Disruptions in
Genetically-Distinct Rat Models of Autism.

The Auerbach lab was excited to have our booth "Rat v. human: the ultimate hearing test" at the Beckman Institute Open House this year. While the rats beat us humans, a good time was had by all. Thanks to everyone who stopped by and learned about our research!

Read about our booth in the news: https://illinoisnewsroom.org/from-muscles-to-molecules-learn-lots-about-science-at-the-beckman-institute-this-weekend/

The Auerbach lab is excited to have 2 new undergraduates joining us this semester. Both are join us from the School of Molecular & Cellular Biology where Natalie is majoring in Biology and Tirth is majoring in Bichemistry.

We are excited to have Manasi Inamdar, a graduate  student in Molecular and Cellular Biology (MCB) joining our lab. Keep  an eye out for her upcoming molecular and proteomic experiments!

The Auerbach lab had a great time at the MCB Undergraduate Research Symposium yesterday.

Haichao's poster on "Analyzing Circuit Disruption in Rat Autism Models of FXS and TSC using ABR"  covered his work over this summer. He has some great preliminary  results that support the behavior data presented by Sarika on "Auditory Behavioral Differences in Genetically-Distinct Rat Models of Autism Spectrum Disorders".

A special thanks to Manasi Inamdar, our recent rotation MCB Graduate student who provided images for Sarika's poster.

Both  Haichao and Sarika will be continuing to work on these projects and we  hope to see new data from their next steps at the U of I Undergraduate Research Symposium this spring.

Dr. Xiaopeng Liu, a senior postdoc, presented
his  poster on his work related following up on central gain and hidden  hearing loss at the Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology  Student Retreat.