South SFV Today

Stanford University's "Research Matters" series explores scientific research and highlights its importance in innovation. One researcher explains, "We know a lot about why moms bond to their babies, and there's a growing field trying to understand this in dads, but we really don't have a good understanding of how infants do that. From the context of brain development, how do you learn who your parents are? How do you communicate with them?"

The Organismal Biology Lab at Stanford studies the neural basis of family relationships, focusing on how infants recognize and communicate with parents. The lab aims to understand how the brain supports these relationships.

The lab's researcher began their work at Harvard, using poison frogs and amphibians as model systems. Male involvement in offspring care is common in amphibians, making them ideal for studying family dynamics and neuroscience. "We have a frog colony on campus, and when we’re looking at family relationships, we have cameras monitoring family interactions, and these are scored," said the researcher.

The lab secured a grant from the NIH to study an autism-related gene in tadpoles and its impact on communication. This research focuses on understanding how mutations affect infant communication and parent relationship dynamics. "We need to understand how something works before we can understand how it breaks," emphasized the researcher.

The researcher also emphasizes the importance of training the next generation. The lab includes five undergraduates, eight graduate students, and four postdocs, reflecting the university's commitment to fostering creativity and basic science. "It's a special place that encourages basic science, which is very difficult to get funded in industry, but it's the foundation on which all of industry rests."

The role of basic science in innovation is highlighted as critical for training people to think critically and address complex questions. The researcher believes universities play a unique role in this area, saying, "A lot of the technologies and applications and healthcare that people rely on are built on training people how to think critically and how to take the best approaches towards answering difficult questions."