A West Virginia University neurobiologist will use a prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award to investigate how brief changes in temperature early in life can shape the brain and behavior.
For years, Eric Horstick, who runs the Horstick Lab in the WVU Eberly College of Arts and Sciences Department of Biology, has used zebrafish to study how early experiences interact with genetic programs to shape the developing brain.
Horstick explained that these small, translucent animals make it possible to study these questions in a living vertebrate. Researchers can observe activity across the brain in real time, measuring behavior, and utilizing genetic tools to investigate mechanisms that are also relevant to other vertebrates.
Temperature is a constant influence on biological processes, Horstick said, but its effects may depend on when a change occurs. Previous work from his lab found that a brief temperature change early in zebrafish development could have lasting effects on behavior, even after the animals returned to standard conditions.
The new nearly $1 million award is an NSF grant that supports early-career faculty in building strong research programs while integrating education into their work. The funds will help the team investigate how early temperature experiences may alter variation in behavior. It will also give students more opportunities to take part in hands-on neuroscience research, from working in the Horstick Lab to exploring data in a neuroscience capstone course.
Horstick said he also plans to develop and build a zebrafish behavioral recording setup giving students a resource for designing experiments and working with data generated by research in the lab to support the capstone course. The project will connect neuroscience students with data science and STEM education and also support an interdisciplinary journal club that brings together researchers in thermal biology across disciplines and potentially colleges.
“Our job is to figure something out that wasn’t known before and bringing people together from multiple disciplines will be an interesting way to do that,” Horstick said. “It can take years for the pieces to come together, but when they do, there is no other job like it. Watching students grow into researchers is one of the most rewarding parts of this work.”
For postdoctoral researcher John Hageter, the project is part of a research path that began as an undergraduate. He joined the Horstick Lab as a senior at WVU in 2019, when the lab was just getting started. He helped set up the fish room and experiments, trained undergraduate students, taught, and analyzed data.
Hageter stayed in the lab for graduate school, where he shifted from undergraduate work in biology and plants toward neuroscience. Horstick encouraged him to develop his own research niche. Today, Hageter builds artificial intelligence and software tools to track animal behavior and analyze data, work that supports the lab’s neuroscience questions while drawing on his interest in data science.
An early paper from the lab, with Hageter as first author, helped lay the groundwork for the new award and now connects work he began as an undergraduate to questions he pursued as a graduate student and continues as a postdoctoral researcher.
“I feel like I’ve been part of something big,” Hageter said. “Eric has always given me the freedom to work toward the lab’s goals and to build something that fits my own interests, too.”
Hageter is one of nearly two dozen undergraduates who have worked in the Horstick Lab, and at least a dozen have earned co-authorship on its publications. Students work directly with the fish, design and conduct behavioral experiments, and see how their observations can become part of a larger scientific question.
“Students are in the driver’s seat,” Horstick said. “They’re doing the work that I’m building stories from, and that work helps us ask the next questions.”
For Horstick, the award brings together a scientific question, a teaching mission, and years of student contributions. It also means his team can continue building on a body of research shaped by students from the lab’s earliest days.
