Suzanne Nolan

Our second Baylor University WISE Graduate Student Seminar Speaker is Suzanne Nolan. Suzanne Nolan is working on her PhD with Dr. Joaquin Lugo in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience here at Baylor University. Her talk is entitled “Autism Squeaks: Mouse Vocalizations and the Relationships between Autism and Epilepsy.”

Summary: Autism and epilepsy are known to share a significant diagnostic overlap. Moreover, animal work has demonstrated that exposure to early life seizures results in the development of autistic-like behaviors in adulthood. However, less is known about the appearance of autistic-like behaviors during earlier periods of development. Ultrasonic vocalizations are one tool that can be used to assess aspects of communication in rodent models. This talk will discuss the involvement of these behaviors in the phenotype of several models of neurodevelopmental disorders, including models of autism, such as the Fmr1 knockout model, and models of early life epilepsy, using chemoconvulsants. Using this phenotype, this work hopes to outline the shared etiology of these two disorders early in development.