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Bill O'Neill, Ph.D.Associate Professor:
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Born in Brooklyn, New York, Bill O'Neill grew up on Long Island. He earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Cornell University in 1969 where he majored in Ecology & Evolution and minored in Neurobiology & Behavior. The Neurobiology and Behavior curriculum components were a source of inspiration to Bill. Examining natural animal behaviors, especially those associated with acoustic signaling, has created a thread of continuity for Bill throughout his professional career.
Immediately after the completion of his undergraduate degree, Bill began working toward a Ph.D. in Ecology and Evolution at SUNY Stony Brook, but was soon attracted to the Psychobiology Program. Not constrained by the laboratory bench, Bill's Ph.D. work with Ron Hoy used mainly field science techniques to address questions related to the territorial behavior of singing insects.
Specifically, Bill examined the role of sound production by katydids in the definition and defense of territorial boundaries. During his Ph.D. work, Bill completed a methods course, where he was introduced to a variety of neurophysiological techniques. This kindled a fire in Bill, who realized that numerous interesting questions related to the neural processes underlying animal behavior could be addressed most appropriately using combined field and bench approaches. More fundamentally, the exposure to these two different research methods led Bill to emerge from his Ph.D. with a refined approach to scientific problems. He recognized the necessity of examining physiology within the context of an animal's natural behavior.
Crickets or Mustached Bats, Hawaii or St. Lous? The Twists & turns of Fate
Bill is living proof that sometimes fate leads us on some interesting twists and turns. After completing his Ph.D., Bill had intended to work with Dan Otte, an insect taxonomist. Dan had proposed examining the reproductively isolated crickets of Hawaii to identify how their calls contributed to speciation. However, fate (i.e., his fiancée) brought Bill to St. Louis to pursue his long standing interests in acoustic communication and animal behavior. Bill was intrigued by the fact that the brain is able to both recognize sounds as being familiar (i.e. can recognize a person by the sound of their voice) and can rapidly process or decode the information content of these sounds to extract meaningful information. These interests led Bill to seek postdoctoral work with Nobuo Suga, a reknowned bat neurophysiologist whose work centered upon understanding the mechanisms of neural processing of acoustic stimuli in the mustached bat.
Mustached Bats
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At the time of his postdoctoral work, neither the physical appearance of bats nor the rabies shots needed to work with them scared Bill away from Nobuo Suga who was investigating how the brain recognizes species specific complex auditory patterns. Although Suga's scientific approach was somewhat unconventional compared to most auditory labs that used a bottom-up strategy towards studying the auditory pathways (ie. progressing from the periphery to more central structures), this ironically appealed to the savvy psychobiological aspects of Bill's training. This gamble and the combination of these two researcher's talents and experiences provided great returns. |
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Suga's approach stemmed from his philosophical point of view that the brain is organized to identify what an animal does with sound as a part of its daily living. For example, which sounds do they produce, listen to, and reject? The collaboration between O'Neill, Suga and others led to a clear demonstration that the auditory cortex deciphers complex auditory patterns (e.g., combinations of tones as opposed to single tones) that are behaviorally critical to the animal's every day life. |
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Working together, they identified first a population of auditory cortical neurons that represent information about the velocity of the bat in flight, and second, another population of neurons that provide information about distance from targets of prey or obstacles in flight. This important work demonstrated that there were populations of cells in the non-tonotopically organized regions of auditory cortex that were systematically organized with respect to the behavioral needs of the animal. The combined behavioral and neurophysiological observations were truly unique and were a critical step in understanding how animals echolocate. |
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Their observations, published in a series of four Science articles in a two-year span, brought the neuroethological approach into the limelight, creating what has now become a unique popular sub-culture of research within the auditory community. Today, nearly twenty years later, the ties between auditory evoked behavior and physiology of bat echolocation remain one of the few clear cut examples of how the neurobiology of audition relates to behavior. The fundamental philosophy of neurobiology obtained in St. Louis was clearly an inspiration to Bill as many of the research questions he later pursued were related to echolocation and its underlying neurophysiology.
Return to New York
Even though the University of Rochester is now becoming an epicenter of auditory research, in 1979, Bill was one of the very first auditory researchers recruited to further characterize the subcortical structures that underlie echolocation. He placed electrodes into the inferior colliculus to study how neurons coded combinations of tones like those found to be effective in driving cortical neurons. These studies revealed little evidence of cells sensitive to combination tones. He and his students then pursued experiments on the coding of dynamically changing auditory stimuli, such as amplitude and frequency modulations and even ventured into the motor side of echolocation, studying the control of vocalization by the anterior cingulated cortex.
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More recently, Bill's collaborative associations have broadened and diversified his interests. Fascinated by how the brain encodes information about dynamic acoustic features, Bill and his (former) doctoral student Willard Wilson examined how neurons in the auditory midbrain encode information about moving auditory stimuli. His most recently graduated student, Mike Gordon, pioneered the lab's current efforts to explore the neural mechanisms underlying directional selectivity for frequency modulations. Currently, he and his student Owen Brimijoin and tech John Housel have been recording from the suprageniculate nucleus (SGN), a thalamic target of the central acoustic tract. The initial studies have demonstrated that SGN neurons respond preferentially to the direction of frequency modulated sweeps. The properties of SGN neurons seem to adapt them to processing the types of FM sounds that are found in mustached bat social vocalizations, rather than echolocation calls. Although the SGN is extremely small (200 microns in diameter) in this species, it receives inputs from the auditory, somatosensory and visual systems, and projects widely to auditory cortex, prefrontal cortex, and lateral amygdala. Consequently, the SGN potentially participates in the processing or integration of auditory, cognitive, and emotive signals, important functions for a very tiny collection of neurons. Bill hopes in his future work to examine whether neurons in SGN are specialized to process respond to frequency modulations found in communication signals.
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Many of the other projects with which Bill is involved are related to his broad interests in speech and aging, communication processing and multisensory integration. In a Program Project notably involving Joe Walton, Jim Ison, Bob Frisina, and Martha Zettel (his spouse), the processing of speech in noisy environments as a function of age is being studied both in humans and in strains of mice with discrete age-related audiological properties. |
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A separate aging project in collaboration with Gary Paige is examining the concordance of spatial localization from multiple sensory maps, and the capacity for plastic changes of these sensory systems. Bill explained that with age or injury, the inputs from various sensory modalities (e.g. vision, hearing) are altered, and may be co-registered in a different manner than they were previously. The primary question to be answered by this investigation is whether the nervous system adapts to changes in inputs from one sensory modality that are mismatched from information derived from another modality. |
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Students and Postdocs
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Like his mentors, Bill has attracted enthusiastic and talented people to his laboratory. Four graduate students have obtained their Ph.D.'s under Bill including: Dave Gooler, Harold Lesser, Willard Wilson, and Mike Gordon. His current doctoral student is Owen Brimijoin from the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Dept. |
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Bob Frisina is a former postdoctoral fellow and current collaborator with Bill, and is currently Professor and Director of Research of Otolaryngology & Surgery, with a secondary appointment in Neurobiology & Anatomy. |
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Two undergraduate neuroscience majors who did senior thesis projects and published with Bill (Jim Makous and Darryl Henze) have gone on to obtain neuroscience Ph.D.'s. Bill has also served the University community with teaching service as the course director in Basic Neurobiology for undergraduate Neuroscience majors from 1979-1998, where he still teaches a major block of lectures, and as a co-director with Tania Pasternak of the Systems Integrative Neuroscience course in the graduate neuroscience curriculum. He was also Director of the Neuroscience Program from 1991 to 1995. |
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What a Batman Does For Fun
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You know someone loves their job when their academic interests translate to their extracurricular interests. How many people do you know who spend their vacations crawling around in small, dark, smelly caves in foreign countries looking for bats? This is clearly a special person with a special spouse. |
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Bill and his wife and collaborator, Martha Zettel, live in Rush, and recently returned from a trip to Kenya with Bat Conservation International www.batcon.org. They spent their days on big game watching expeditions, and their nights identifying 25 species of bats out of about 50 found in Kenya . Consistent with Bill's interests in conservation and the outdoors, he leads annual trips through the Florida Everglades for Nature Discoveries: Ecotours & Vacations. When not trekking through the outdoors, Bill enjoys high-performance driving, concerts, and movies. |
Bill remarked that his periodic bat research trips maintain his perspective on the big picture of how his research relates to bat behavior. He also takes pride in the fact that the emphasis upon using behaviorally-relevant stimuli in bat auditory research has helped to prompt work in other animals that maintains the relationship between acoustic signals and their relevance to behavior. Students or postdoctoral fellows interested in the neurobiology of behavior will find the prospects of working in the O'Neill lab to be music to their ears.