The Whitney Laboratory for Marine Bioscience
On March 1st, Brendan Gibbs, a graduate student advised by James Liao, Professor of Biology, successfully defended his Ph.D. entitled “From the field to the neuron: an integrative approach to understanding natural animal behavior”.
During his Ph.D., Dr. Gibbs developed and applied electrophysiological techniques to help us better understand how animals sense and move through the world. Dr. Gibbs leveraged various model systems to investigate the function and evolution of animal behavior across many levels of biological organization, from single neurons to the whole organism in the wild. His last chapter looked at the role of stress chemicals in altering hair cell sensitivity in zebrafish, and improves our understanding of human hearing and deafness disorders under different physiological states. Dr. Gibbs has published his chapters in the top journals in his field (Journal of Experimental Biology and Journal of Neuroscience Methods) and has presented his work at international conferences such as the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. Dr. Gibbs was also an active member of the Saint Augustine community as he collaborated with stakeholders in his conservation work on local gamefish species. While at the Whitney Dr. Gibbs has received the Matthaei Ecological Scholarship and his research has been highlighted for an Early Career Researcher interview at the Journal of Experimental Biology. This April he will be joining Professor Tsuneya Ikezu’s lab to work on molecular neurotherapeutics in the Department of Neuroscience, Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville Florida as an NIH-funded Postdoctoral Research Associate.
Congratulations Brendan, we wish you the best in all your future endeavors!