SHEETS LAB - Key Persons
A St. Louis native, Bobby earned his BS in Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences from the University of Missouri - Columbia, and his AAS in Veterinary Technology from Jefferson College. While attending the University of Missouri - Columbia, Bobby played on the university's wheelchair basketball team. Bobby joined the Sheets Lab in May of 2022 after 5 years of researching therapies for noise-induced and drug-induced hearing loss in mice in Kevin Ohlemiller's lab at WashU. Outside of work, Bobby enjoys spending time outside with his pitbull Bailey, attending Cardinals baseball games, and watching college basketball and college football.
David is an ENT resident on physician-scientist research track at Washington University in St. Louis. In the Sheets lab, he developed a novel cisplatin-induced ototoxicity zebrafish model to better understand the pathophysiology of this process and to inform therapies for this unmet clinical need. His only prior experience with fish was being one at the poker table, but David's clinical background and experience in head and neck cancer drug development made him a beneficial and highly productive addition to the lab.
Outside of research, David enjoys Japanese food, non-Japanese food, and morning strolls with his dog.
Kyle is a sensory biologist with interests in animal behavior, neuroscience, and marine biology, with a particular emphasis on sharks, rays, and teleost fishes.
His research uses fish models to understand how basal vertebrates detect and respond to environmental cues, how human activities can disrupt these processes, and how animals can recover from disruption. The goal of his research is to integrate ethology and the conservation of biodiversity because understanding how and why animals respond to specific environmental cues is key to predicting how they will respond to anthropogenic changes to their environment.
He is currently a researcher at the Coastal Oregon Marine Experiment Station (COMES), where he investigate the effects of electromagnetic fields from offshore renewable energy installations on the behavior of marine wildlife. Basically, he lives at the ocean, play with EMFs, tags big fish, and uses the machine vision and learning tech that he developed for use in the Sheets lab to analyze fish behavior.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Principal Investigator
Lavinia is a Portland Oregon native that lived on both coasts of the United States before settling in St Louis. She received a B.S. in Biology from Pacific University with a minor in Music and was briefly a member of the Portland Opera Chorus before entering the Neuroscience Graduate Program at Oregon Health & Science University. At OHSU, Lavinia studied intracellular transport regulation in the lab of Bruce Schnapp. Her graduate training was supplemented with occasional trips to Eugene Oregon where the zebrafish labs at the Institute of Neuroscience would allow her to observe, learn genetic and screening techniques, and share their coffee cake. She also received invaluable mentoring and support from Stephen Johnson, whom she briefly overlapped with at WashU many years later.
Lavinia continued to train at OHSU in the lab of Teresa Nicolson, where she was first introduced to zebrafish as a model for hearing and deafness. In Teresa's lab, Lavinia's research focused on how hair cells develop and maintain their synaptic connections with afferent nerves. At Mass Eye and Ear's Eaton Peabody Laboratories, where Lavinia was the inaugural Amelia Peabody Fellow, Lavinia's research shifted from hair-cell organ development to damage and repair. Since 2017, Lavinia continues this research with her lab team in the Department of Otolaryngology at WashU.
A Portland Oregon native and graduate of the neuroscience program at Oregon Health & Science University, Lavinia is currently an Associate Professor with the Department of Otolaryngology at WashU.
After growing up in Kansas City, MO, Melanie completed her BA in Biology from Washington University in St. Louis. Melanie was the first member of Sheets Lab at WashU and helped establish the model for "noise" induced synaptopathy in zebrafish lateral line organs. Her research interests include zebrafish disease models and using genetic tools to study the nervous system. Outside of the lab, Melanie enjoys hiking, tap dancing, baking, and sewing.
A Paris native, Sophie earned her PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris (France), in 2023. Her research interests focus on sensory neuroscience of underwater animals (zebrafish and cephalopods) equipped with lateral line, hearing and vision. She is also passionate with neuroethology and animal behavior.
Outside the lab, Sophie enjoys horse riding, sculpting and drawing, going to art places, and traveling.
Tara moved from Detroit to St. Louis after graduating from Kenyon College with her BS in Biology. At Kenyon, Tara was a pole vaulter for the varsity track and field team and occasionally attended the school's ballroom dance club meetings. She enjoys watching baseball, reading, and hiking in her spare time. Her project entails the quantification of support cell progenitors and the role of macrophages after ototoxic injury.