Kendra Sewall, Ph.D.

ksewall@email.unc.edu

• Department of Biology

Education

• University of California Davis
  Animal Behavior

Mentors

• Keith Sockman, Ph.D.

Biography

I believe that understanding biology helps people make better decisions about issues that affect their quality of life and the issues that we face as a society. I see studying and teaching biology as a means to continue my own intellectual growth and to help students develop problem solving and reasoning skills inherent to the field. Integrating teaching and research is important to me because it provides opportunities to learn and teach new techniques, promotes integrative research and encourages creative problem solving. As a SPIRE postdoctoral fellow, beginning the fall of 2008, I am enthusiastic about working with members of the UNC community, as well as faculty and students at minority serving institutions, to promote integrative scientific research and education. I hope my previous experiences in teaching and research will be an asset.

The emerging field of social neuroscience aims to describe the highly conserved brain mechanisms that specifically mediate social behavior. Understanding the cognitive and neural mechanisms underpinning communication is a central issue in social neuroscience because the ability to detect, respond to and transmit information is fundamental to sociality. My research integrates neurobiology and behavior to examine the cognitive and neural basis of vocal communication in songbirds, a well-established model relevant to understanding human speech. My thesis work with Tom Hahn at UC Davis examined the potential for the cognitive mechanisms underpinning communication to impede the social intermixing of sympatric morphs of red crossbills. Some animals learn to produce and recognize new signals throughout their lives, facilitating communication and social interaction with a range of companions. Limited plasticity in signal production and recognition, in contrast, can impede social interaction and lead to social isolation. Collectively, my doctoral work supports the hypothesis that limited plasticity in the cognitive mechanisms underpinning communication could permit contact calls to impede the social intermixing of red crossbill morphs. My present postdoctoral work with Keith Sockman at UNC examines the neural basis of social modulation of communication behavior in songbirds. I use (1) neuroanatomical measurements, (2) immunocytochemistry (ICC) to measure the expression of genes involved in neural response (immediate early genes, IEG's) and (3) ICC to study the expression of neurotransmitters and the enzymes involved in their synthesis to examine the neuromodulation of activity in avian brain regions that control communication. I plan to continue and expand this work on the integration of brain mechanisms that regulate communication with the aim of better understanding how changes in neural activity are mediated by neuromodulators and how plasticity in these neural mechanisms relates to sociality. The integrative nature of my research is conducive to involving students and I hope to build upon my previous experiences collaborating with and teaching undergraduate students, as a SPIRE fellow.

I am invested in teaching and I have sought out opportunities to grow as an instructor throughout my career. As a graduate student at the University of California (UC) Davis I attended a course in college teaching, gave regular guest lectures in courses ranging from 20 to 200 students, and served as a teaching assistant for both introductory and advanced biology courses including a non-majors biology class, animal behavior, and laboratory sections for systemic physiology and neurophysiology. I was selected as an NSF Teaching Fellow through the UC Davis School of Education which gave me opportunities to collaborate with local teachers and School of Education faculty to conduct science education research in K-12 classrooms. I completed two science education studies that were presented at the 2006 National Science Teacher Association conference. Finally, I received a Chancellor's Teaching Fellowship that permitted me to co-teach a 250 student lecture course in Animal Behavior. My teaching practice is informed by my experiences and training in science education. I focus on engaging students in problem solving while concurrently exercising communication skills because I believe these are fundamental and transferable skills that can inform decision making processes throughout a student's life. I am especially interested in incorporating authentic scientific research into laboratory classes and one of my goals as a SPIRE fellow is to develop my ability to facilitate hands-on learning in the classroom and in the lab.