USC summer academy in otolaryngology offers hands-on research to undergraduates

When USC undergraduate Johanna Reyes began a six-week summer academy in otolaryngology at the Keck School of Medicine of USC, she had little experience in a research laboratory. By the end, she was so intrigued by the breadth of auditory neuroscience that she decided to continue working in the lab. The USC Hearing and Communication Neuroscience Summer Research Academy brings undergraduate students from USC and other schools into laboratories to gain structured research experience. The undergraduates also take lab tours and attend talks by researchers that showcase the diversity of work and career opportunities across the field.

“It’s a sort of crash course during the summer,” said Radha Kalluri, PhD, associate professor in the USC Caruso Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery and the Department of Biomedical Engineering. “Some students are coming in because they are great at biology or STEM, but they don’t necessarily want to go to medical school, and they want to know what else is out there.”

This year’s nine undergraduate participants were matched with laboratories based on their interests. For the first time, all nine received stipends. USC students received funding from the Hearing and Communications Neuroscience Training Program and USC Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program (URAP). Non-USC students received support from a variety of other sources, including a National Institutes of Health grant based out of Johns Hopkins University, and other funds from the USC Caruso Department of Otolaryngology – Head and Neck Surgery. The program also benefited from the cooperation of Bridging the Gaps, an eight-week, in-resident summer research program at the Keck School of Medicine designed for undergraduate students interested in medicine, health, and biomedical sciences.

The program culminated at the end of July with student presentations on their summer research.

“Our department is unique,” said Kalluri. “We have physicians; we also have speech language pathology, audiology and research as career pathways. We want to expose the students to all of them.”

Hands-on research

For Reyes, a neuroscience major, the experience was transformative. In the lab of Karolina Charaziak, PhD, Reyes studied mice with induced hearing loss, and conducted hearing tests to measure responses to various frequencies and noise levels.

Each week, she toured a lab, learned about its research and experimental methods, and then discussed what they had learned.

“I had little experience in research going into this summer, so being in the labs and getting to know all of the different principal investigators was really eye-opening for me,” said Reyes. “I was able to see that auditory neuroscience is not just one singular field, but instead an umbrella of different projects and different people who are focusing on trying to solve different things.”

As an undergraduate, it can be intimidating to jump into scientific research. However, the summer academy provided an opportunity to join a lab and ask questions in a low-stakes setting, said Wyatt Young, an undergraduate at the University of Virginia.

“Dr. Kalluri gave us two hours every week to sit down and ask her questions and explore our interests, which was great,” he said. “It helped me learn what research actually is: what you can get out of it, what you can’t get out of it, the different paths and opportunities that you have.”

While studying ways to visualize the motion of the eardrum in the lab of John Oghalai, MD, Young also began to contemplate the prevalence of hearing loss and the larger goals of inner ear research. He now plans to apply to medical school.

“Hearing loss is such a huge problem,” he said, adding that the program opened his eyes to the research that exists to help people across the world.

Jessica Chao, a USC undergraduate who researched hearing aids and cochlear implants in the lab of Ray Goldsworthy, PhD, said the academy sparked her passion for learning.

“I realized that everything was so interesting to me, and that I could really see myself working in research in the future,” said Chao, who is majoring in pharmacology and drug development.

The depth of research surprised Kaitlin Bertrand, an undergraduate at the University of California, Irvine, who also worked in the Goldsworthy Lab. She studied how to improve pitch perception in bone-anchored hearing aids.

“There’s so much more that goes on behind the scenes, like the collaboration between faculty and students — and also just the complexity,” she said. “Some of these research projects take years, and even then, you don’t necessarily reach your goals.”

Kalluri hopes that the students continue to do research and that the academy can keep showing students the breadth of career opportunities in otolaryngology.

“A lot of the students want to go to medical school,” she said. “So next year, we’re hoping that we’ll expand the clinical rotation component, because I know the students really love that part.”