As previously announced, postdoc Loranzie Rogers of the Bellono Lab has been named as a 2024 Hanna H. Gray Fellowship from HHMI. The fellowship provides up to 1.5 million dollars of support to early career researchers as they complete their postdocs and launch their own labs.
“I was thrilled to hear that Loranzie was named as a Hanna Gray Fellow,” says Rogers’s Ph.D. advisor Joseph Sisneros of University of Washington. “Supporting early career scientists like Loranzie is essential for advancing science and fostering a diverse and inclusive research community. These scientists bring fresh ideas, push boundaries, and often pursue bold new approaches to science. Fellowships like the Hanna Gray Fellowship help bridge the challenging transition from training to independence by providing financial stability and resources. By prioritizing diversity, these programs not only enhance creativity and equity in science but also address the ‘leaky pipeline’ that causes talented individuals to leave STEM fields. I do believe that supporting promising scientists like Loranzie is a meaningful investment in the future of science and society.”
Rogers originally hails from the small town of Hutchinson in south central Minnesota. Science intrigued Rogers from an early age, but he didn’t seriously consider a career in science until high school when he had a physics teacher with previous research experience who exposed him to the fun of doing science.
As an undergraduate at University of Minnesota, Duluth, Rogers became curious about how sensory systems work. After earning his bachelor’s degree, he stayed on at University of Minnesota, Duluth for a master’s program in biology. He joined Allen Mensinger’s lab, where he studied how fish perceive sound.
“I think the biggest thing I learned during my master’s was how important it is to find diverse mentors that can provide you with unique perspectives for how they progressed through their career and how I might progress, ” Rogers says. “Even in Duluth, Minnesota, it wasn’t the most culturally diverse area. And so I didn’t really get to meet another postdoc or professor of color until I was in my graduate program and spending more time at other research universities and institutions. It was an important time where I got to see what other successful scientists of color looked like and how they progressed through this academic landscape.”
As a Ph.D. student at University of Washington Seattle, Rogers joined Sisneros’s lab, which studies a type of fish called the plainfin midshipman. These fish are known for their mating calls, produced by males and heard by females. Rogers investigated how the structures of the midshipman’s inner ear detect underwater sound. “Vocal fishes help us understand the evolution of communication systems in vertebrates by revealing how vocalization mechanisms have developed and diversified over time,” Sisneros says. “They provide insights into how animals use sound to navigate their environments, find mates, establish territories, and they can enhance our understanding of sensory integration. Studying their relatively simple nervous systems can shed light on how sound production and auditory processing are coordinated, with applications to other vertebrates, including humans.”
“I started my Ph.D. in the fall of 2019 and I had about six months prior to the COVID pandemic that led to the shutdown,” Rogers says. “For a lot of folks, that put a hold on their research, but, for me, working with these different fishes, I had to be on campus to take care of them, which meant I could be on campus to do all of my work. With classes moving virtually, I was able to listen to my lectures while I was in a rig doing science. So I just got to work all the time. I thought that was really great, because I got to be very focused.”
Rogers found that an inner ear structure, the utricle, exhibits seasonal auditory plasticity as an adaptive mechanism to facilitate social and reproductive acoustic communication by enhancing the coupling between sender and receiver.
Sisneros recalls Rogers being a dedicated and observant Ph.D. student. “I truly believe that what sets Loranzie apart as a scientist is not only his technical expertise but also his remarkable ability to think critically and synthesize ideas across disciplines,” Sisneros says. “He consistently impressed me with his motivation, eagerness to learn, and determination to master new skills. I have no doubt that he has the potential to become an exceptional scientist and a leader in his field.”
For his postdoctoral work, Rogers says, “I really wanted to broaden the organisms and questions I worked on as well as the approaches I use to ask how the sensory systems of various organisms have adapted for their environment.The Bellono Lab is really great, and Nick’s an exceptionally supportive mentor in terms of letting postdocs come to the lab and start up new systems to work on various topics. So when I told Nick that I was interested in working with amphibians, he was very supportive and also very excited about the idea.”
Amphibians are unique in that they spend part of their life as aquatic tadpoles and later become terrestrial adults. Rogers is currently using the salamander species axolotls to ask questions about how amphibians’ sense of smell changes during this water-to-land transition.
“Amphibians present a unique model system to ask how organisms adapt to extremely different niches within a single lifetime as they remodel nearly all of their organs to transition from aquatic to terrestrial environments during metamorphosis,” explains MCB faculty and Rogers’s adviser Nicholas Bellono. “One of our lab’s first animal protocols was to study amphibian metamorphosis, but we couldn’t get any momentum. All projects require the right person.”
Bellono continues, “Loranzie came to the lab to learn about connecting animal behavior and physiology to molecular function. He had a strong background in organ and organismal level analyses and was motivated to learn molecular approaches. He was especially excited about how the internal state of animals (hunger, reproductive) can influence how they respond to their environment – a question he asked me about in sharks years before when I met him at the MBL. He’s had a really quick start in exploring this broad question using robust state-dependent changes in amphibians, which has excitingly revealed important physiology that has implications for water to land transitions in one of the most evolutionary impactful transitions in animals.”
While Rogers has used many electrophysiological techniques in the past, he is now incorporating more molecular methods into his approach. “How this works is they express distinct classes of olfactory receptors in each habitat,” he says. “They express receptors that are well-adapted to an aquatic habitat when they live in an aquatic environment, and then they shift their expression to receptors that are well-adapted in a terrestrial habitat. So we’re trying to understand how they adaptively reprogram their sensory structures.”
“Among the most important features that contribute to his success is how well he works with others to accomplish a larger goal,” Bellono adds. “For example, axolotls are salamanders that don’t normally undergo metamorphosis but can be acutely induced to transition by adding thyroxine to their water, thereby providing a useful comparative model. While theoretically possible, this really didn’t work at all.So, Loranzie worked with Brittany, Moreira, and Tessa from our lab to establish a protocol for inducing metamorphosis in axolotls. This was absolutely required for all of the sophisticated analyses he’s now able to do. Beyond this, he’s always up for trying anything – feeding frenzy in piranhas, vision in cephalopods, etc etc. He’s a fantastic member of the community and always willing to help and work with others.”
Reflecting on his postdoctoral experience so far, Rogers says he’s glad to be in a lab that encourages exploring new facets of scientific questions. “Nick runs a broad lab that brings together a lot of great folks who are interested in very diverse scientific questions and have varying scientific backgrounds, and this allows us to bring together a lot of different expertise to tackle our current research questions,” he says. “It’s a lot of new things I’ve been able to learn that has really broadened how I think about science and ask questions.” He also adds,“The third floor Bio labs group comprising the Bellono, Elya, Nett, Losick, and Cavanaugh Labs has made for a fun, welcoming, and rigorous place to be doing science.”
