Hilary Katz
Western Kentucky University, KY·Neuroscience
Most people with a spinal cord injury never regain full function, but some animals rebuild a damaged spinal cord on their own. The larval sea lamprey, an eel-like jawless fish, is one of them.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Biology
Physiology
- Topics
spinal cord injury
spinal cord regeneration
sea lamprey
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jan 2028
What they work on
- Quantify how mechanosensory dorsal cells, spinal neurons that sense touch, change their electrical properties after spinal cord injury in larval sea lamprey, using intracellular electrophysiology recordings from single cells.
- Measure changes in shape and branching of regenerating mechanosensory dorsal cells by filling recorded neurons with dye and imaging them with high-resolution microscopy.
- Describe how local spinal sensory circuits respond to traumatic injury and recovery in the lamprey, building a foundation for later work on how sensory feedback shapes functional recovery.
More about the research
Studying how its spinal circuits recover can reveal how nerve networks respond to injury and heal. This project focuses on spinal neurons that detect touch and pressure, and asks how they change after injury.
Why it matters
Spinal cord injuries often cause lasting loss of movement and sensation. By showing how sensory neurons change in an animal that naturally regenerates its spinal cord, this work could help explain how local spinal circuits recover after trauma, and may eventually inform research on how sensory feedback supports functional recovery.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Michael Granato
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Neuroscience
Identify the neuronal populations where three habituation genes act, using transgenic behavioral rescue in zebrafish mutants defective in acoustic startle habituation.
Qi Lin Cao
Florida International University, FL·Neuroscience
Determine how perivascular fibroblasts, support cells surrounding blood vessels, become activated and upregulate PI16 after cervical spinal cord injury, focusing on interferon-gamma signaling and fibrotic scar formation.
The school
Western Kentucky University: 1 labs on PI Pages, $11M a year on research, 13 research doctorates a year.
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