On their last week in the lab, we bid a fond farewell to our summer undergrads Charles and Ryan. We loved seeing their final posters!
We are also welcoming Emma Meihoffer for this entire upcoming year as a research technician working on rodent vestibular ephys and behaviors.
The Cullen lab has some new faces this summer! We have Charles Ye, a rising senior majoring in Physics at University of Florida, who will be working on neural data from primates during postural disturbance.
New paper out with our collaborators at NIDCD! This study explores the essential role of type I hair cells in mouse postural control. Congrats to lab members Brandie Morris Verdone and Vanessa Chang for their work on this! Read more here: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Type I hair cells of striolar and central zones in vestibular organs are essential for head stability and postural control | PNAS
The vestibular system of the inner ear provides head motion and orientation information required for maintaining balance and spatial orientation. E...
pnas.org
Finally, a huge congrats as well to Dr. Pum Wiboonsaksakul for completing his PhD! His thesis explores the effects and possibilities of vestibular prosthesis in macaque monkeys!
Then we have another master's student, Michela de Marzi, who has examined how hearing loss affects the vestibular function of human patients! She will be pursuing her PhD at University of Utah looking at how mild traumatic brain injury impacts reactive balance. Congrats to Michela!
Congrats to our master students for graduating this year! First we have our master's student, Yaolin Liu, who graduated this Monday after his fantastic work on a new project involving tracking and monitoring the movement of bats!
Cullen lab alum Dr. Wagner Souza was recently featured in the new write-up for the one year anniversary of the Canada Leads program. His recently founded lab uses AI to improve surgical outcomes. Congrats to Dr. Souza! Read more about it here: www.uhn.ca/corporate/ne...
More Than 70 Scientists Join UHN Through Canada Leads Program
Celebrate the one-year anniversary of Canada Leads at UHN. Discover how this program is transforming research and attracting top scientists to Canada’s leading hospital.
uhn.ca
A big congratulations to Nikita Lebedz on being awarded the 2026 NSF Graduate Research Fellowship! Nikita’s work will study how the brain controls movement with the goal of developing neural implants that bypass or restore lost cerebellar function.
Keeping your balance means turning sensory input into well-timed movements. In this paper, grad student Olivia Leavitt Brown shows that acceleration and velocity govern different phases of postural control. www.jneurosci.org/content/earl...
Acceleration and Velocity Dissociate Temporal Phases of Postural Control in Rhesus Macaques
Maintaining balance requires the nervous system to transform sensory signals about unexpected postural perturbations into precisely timed motor commands. Although human studies have established that p...
jneurosci.org
For an accessible summary, check out the JHU BME news writeup about this paper! www.bme.jhu.edu/news-events/...
JHU Study Overturns Decades-Old Myth About Bats
For more than 80 years, scientists believed bat eyes were static. Research from the Cullen Lab reveals the first direct evidence of bat eye movement and its critical role in navigation.
bme.jhu.edu
Cullen Lab@thecullenlab.bsky.social · 4mo agoEcholocating bats have long been thought to not move their eyes. Now, Cullen lab alum Vanessa Chang shows that bats exhibit minimal VOR but robust OKR and otolith-driven responses during off-axis rotation, showing that bat gaze relies on both visual and vestibular input. www.cell.com/current-biol...
Echolocating bats have long been thought to not move their eyes. Now, Cullen lab alum Vanessa Chang shows that bats exhibit minimal VOR but robust OKR and otolith-driven responses during off-axis rotation, showing that bat gaze relies on both visual and vestibular input. www.cell.com/current-biol...
Bat eye movements resolve a long-standing question in gaze control
Chang et al. overturn an 80-year-old assumption by showing that echolocating bats make robust eye movements. Bats generate strong visually driven optokinetic and otolith-mediated responses but exhibit...
cell.com
In this new paper, postdoc Brandie Morris Verdone shows that mice generate active eye movements to redirect gaze during goal-directed orienting, revealing conserved principles of eye–head coordination across vertebrates. www.nature.com/articles/s42...
In most vestibular structures, sensory input is suppressed during self-generated movement. Here, postdoc Robyn Mildren shows an exception in the cerebellar nodulus/uvula, which faithfully encodes head motion in space across behavioral contexts. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Ground-truth encoding of self-motion in the primate cerebellar nodulus and uvula - Nature Communications
How the brain meets these competing demands–and where such a veridical “ground-truth” representation is computed–remains unknown. Here authors show that the cerebellar nodulus/uvula–a region essential...
nature.com
Heading to ARO? Check out postdoc Ruihan Wei's presentation: "Probing Central Vestibular Processing of Prosthetic Input via High-Density Neural Recordings in Freely Moving Nonhuman Primates" (2/7/26 at 3:30 PM) #ARO2026 #vestibular #research
Proper planar orientation of inner ear hair cells is essential for sensory function. This new paper n this new paper demonstrates that GPR156 is critical for hair cell planar orientation, and inactivation of GPR156 leads to both auditory and vestibular deficits. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
GPR156 is required in sensory hair cells for proper auditory and vestibular function - Scientific Reports
Proper orientation of the apical cytoskeleton in auditory and vestibular hair cells is essential for their sensory function. A recently identified regulator of hair cell orientation is the G protein-c...
nature.com
Keeping the head steady during walking is critical for stable vision and posture - how is it accomplished at the level of motor control? Postdoc Ruihan Wei shows that this fundamental behavior results from context-sensitive neck muscle coordination in macaques. www.nature.com/articles/s42...
thecullenlab.org
Detecting deficits in vestibular schwannoma patients can be challenging using traditional clinical assessments. A deep learning classifier developed by Masters student Lou Voinonv uses data from whole-body motion sensors to identify pre-surgical changes in movement. thecullenlab.org/wp-content/u...
thecullenlab.org
Falls are a major complication of vestibular loss, and fall prevention requires understanding broader risk factors. Masters student Lou Kohler Voinov explored data from >5700 participants and found some expected risk factors plus some unexpected ones! link.springer.com/article/10.1...
Multifactorial predictors of falls in older adults: a decade of data from the National Health and Aging Trends Study - BMC Geriatrics
Background Falls are a leading cause of injury and loss of independence among older adults, yet comprehensive, population-level models that integrate diverse risk factors across broad demographic grou...
link.springer.com
Seems like just yesterday we were celebrating (and snapping a quick lab photo at) Kathy's installation as the Raj & Neera Singh Professor at @jhu.edu!
New paper out! Thrilled to share CUSP, a fully automated deep-learning framework for sorting complex spikes from high-density cerebellar recordings. CUSP is now live on GitHub so the community can use, test, and build on it. Paper: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41265572/ GitHub: github.com/CullenLab/CUSP
Our SFN symposium review is out! This fantastic team effort presented a cross-species look at how the brain predicts and attenuates its own self-generated sensory signals during action. www.jneurosci.org/content/45/4...
Before this morning’s #SfN25 poster session is done, stop by to learn about PhD student Chenhao Bao’s work to improve detection of complex spikes in Purkinje cells, a crucial challenge in cerebellar high density recordings.
Big thanks to this afternoon’s #SfN25 symposium speakers for illuminating mechanisms of sensory cancellation across species and modalities, and especially to @kkilteni.bsky.social for organizing!
Local coolest lab member @lexcience.bsky.social presented recent work using high-density recordings to investigate self-motion processing in macaque cortex at yesterday’s #SfN25 afternoon poster session
A fantastic round of talks on vestibular prostheses, including work from grad students Oliver Stanley, Olivia Leavitt Brown, and Akshit Chhabra. We still have a few more talks and posters, so look for us in your programs! #sfn @omelbrown.bsky.social @oliwhail.bsky.social @akshitchhabra.bsky.social
Need something to do at 8AM on a Sunday morning? Come see these Cullen Lab members working on vestibular prosthesis projects at the Vestibular & Visual Prostheses Nanosymposium (Room 23A)!
We made it to #SfN2025! Brave the rain and come see Merrill (J6) present on self motion encoding in mouse VN, and Raabeae (J10) present on kinematic features of superior canal diheisence syndrome
Congrats to lab members Chenhao Bao and Merrill Green for winning this week's JHU OneNeuro FotoFriday contest with their illustration of simple and complex spikes recorded simultaneously from a cerebellar Purkinje cell! www.oneneurojhu.org/art/
Can a tiny hole in the superior canal change the way we walk? 🧠🚶 In our new study, we show that people with unilateral SCDS exhibit distinct gait kinematics—revealing canal-specific roles in mobility and pointing to new directions for vestibular rehab www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Superior canal dehiscence syndrome induces canal-specific kinematic adaptations during locomotion - Scientific Reports
Scientific Reports - Superior canal dehiscence syndrome induces canal-specific kinematic adaptations during locomotion
nature.com