Shaping Success: The LSU Lattin Lab’s Impact on Louisiana’s Future Doctors and Scientists
November 12, 2024
Most of Louisiana’s doctors are LSU alumni, with many starting their journeys in the LSU College of Science and its Department of Biological Sciences. Dr. Christine Lattin, a 2024 LSU Rainmaker and associate professor, exemplifies the transformative impact of LSU Science faculty in creating meaningful, hands-on experiences for students. Here, meet four LSU alumni who gained their first medical and research experiences in Dr. Lattin’s lab, where her mentorship and research opportunities helped them develop critical skills that propelled their careers in medicine and health sciences.
Kaitlin Couvillion, LSU Health New Orleans medical student.
Kaitlin Couvillion from Lacombe, Louisiana, was so set on becoming a doctor and doing undergraduate research to prepare for medical school that she reached out to Lattin, who was recruited to join LSU in 2018, while Lattin was still completing her post-doctoral fellowship at Yale.
“I was actually the first person she ever hired,” Couvillion said. “I’d learned about her work and knew she was doing stuff with CT scans and other things I thought would have clinical relevance. I helped with pretty much everything in her lab and was there as a student researcher for all four years of my undergraduate degree.”
Today, Couvillion is a second-year medical student at LSU Health New Orleans.
“Dr. Lattin played a big role in why I got into medical school because she pushed me to excel and because I learned so much,” Couvillion said.
“Beyond the bench work, I learned how scientists think and how they approach things; how to discover and defend your perspective. That’s not something that comes naturally to a lot of people; it takes practice. It changed how I will think as a clinician and inspired me to want to mentor other people in the future as well.”
Couvillion did both field work and lab work with house sparrows, an invasive species, in Lattin’s lab to learn how the birds’ microbiomes and risk for infection change in relationship to their environment and parasites, such as mites, which can thrive in warm and humid climates.
Allison Cannon, LSU Health New Orleans medical student.
“That became the focus of my honor’s thesis,” Couvillion said. “I loved the research so much, I’m now actually in the process of applying to the MD-PhD program here, so I’ll be going to grad school and medical school and then going into residency.”
A classmate of Couvillion’s, also in her second year of medical school at LSU Health New Orleans and alumni of the LSU Lattin Lab, is Allison Cannon from Shreveport, Louisiana.
“I joined the lab my junior year of college,” Cannon said. “That research and my honors thesis was a large part of my application to medical school. I was able to show the trials and tribulations I went through with research and how I persevered. That applies directly to medical school because medical school isn’t easy. There’s a lot of ups and downs and you have to get through the tough parts. The lab taught me a lot about that.”
In the Lattin Lab, Cannon studied immunology and avian malaria, which has a similar disease process to human malaria. Learning from animals how to help people as well as animals in changing environments remains a primary focus of the Lattin Lab.
“That experience probably opened more doors for me than anything else,” Cannon added.
Another research connection between animal and human health explored in the lab is neophobia, or fear of unfamiliar things.
Eve Gautreaux, neuroscience PhD student at the University of Pennsylvania.
Eve Gautreaux from Houma, Louisiana, spent her senior year at LSU in the Lattin Lab looking at cellular, molecular and neuronal explanations for differences in bird behavior.
While some birds would not approach or eat in the presence of a newly introduced and perfectly benign purple plastic egg or yellow pipe cleaner, others didn’t seem to care. Fearful birds can also learn from less anxious birds how to overcome their fear, and it’s possible this learning leads to physical changes in the brain; something the lab is currently investigating.
Earlier this year, Lattin received a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation—the largest such grant in LSU history at over $1 million—to advance the work. The size of the grant speaks to the potential impact of the research. It could help animal populations survive and thrive in human-altered environments and also help people overcome mental health challenges, such as anxiety and PTSD.
Gautreaux is currently pursuing a PhD in neuroscience at University of Pennsylvania.
“The work in the lab at LSU encouraged me to move forward in my field,” Gautreaux said. “I don’t know anyone who has never had to depend on medicine, and we wouldn’t do this research with animals if it wasn’t really important and immediately impactful, or if we somehow could gain this knowledge some other way.”
At LSU, Gautreaux helped develop protocols to protect animals used in research.
“No experiment will be approved unless it’s humane,” Gautreaux said. “There are stringent regulations and if you can replace the animal with maybe computational or AI modeling, you have to do that instead. For this research to move forward, it has to pass so many checks and get approval from the committee, which includes veterinarians and members from the community. I didn’t know about any of that before I joined the Lattin Lab.”
Ayushi Patel, PhD student at LSU Health New Orleans.
Gautreaux says her research experience in the Lattin Lab at LSU set a high standard.
“It gave me a blueprint for what I wanted out of any lab and grad school; the type of atmosphere and dynamics I wanted,” Gautreaux said. “It’s my goal to have my own lab and be a professor myself one day, because I love research and—equally as much—I love mentoring and teaching.”
Ayushi Patel from Slidell, Louisiana, is also pursuing a PhD at LSU Health New Orleans.
“The things I learned in the Lattin Lab have been crucial to me,” Patel said. “I learned critical techniques and soft skills, like science communication and how to understand complex questions that haven’t been asked before. That helps me greatly as I continue to study interdisciplinary biomedical sciences and constantly apply these techniques and skills in my rotations. I’m proud to have been part of two teams that are constantly pushing the boundaries of science and helping us understand mental illness and improve human health.”
Before graduating with a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from LSU last May, Patel received a Distinguished Undergraduate Researcher award from the LSU Discover program.