Endowed professorship is a milestone in her WashU
research journey.
As an undergraduate student at Stockton University in New Jersey, Hysell Oviedo, PhD, heard a lecture that sparked her later research endeavors.
At Stockton, she’d considered a dentistry career and was on a pre-dentistry track for a while. She’d also contemplated studying botany, drawn by her love of plants. Then came a seminar by a new faculty member who had worked on echolocation in barn owls and bats.
“That lecture blew my mind,” she said. “It was just a combination of how beautiful that whole work was, plus the professor was good at contextualizing science in terms of giving the human aspect of it. The work was just so beautiful in terms of a biological system that operates at the very limits of what we think a biological system can do.
“At first, I just thought: This is so cool. I want to learn more about this. It quickly became a career path.”
The professor became her undergraduate research mentor, and a journey began.
After earning dual bachelor’s degrees in biology with a neurobiology track and literature with a French literature track, Oviedo gained acceptance to New York University’s Center for Neural Science, where she earned her PhD in neuroscience.
Following a postdoctoral fellowship at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Oviedo was an associate professor at City College of New York’s biology department before joining WashU Medicine’s Department of Neuroscience in 2023.
On March 20, Oviedo achieved a career milestone when she was installed as the Roger M. Perlmutter Career Development Assistant Professor of Biomedical Research.
“It’s an honor to be recognized in terms of potential for contributions to neuroscience,” she said. “It’s always nice to feel like other people see your potential and reward you with an honor.”
The distinction is another career highlight for Oviedo, and the endowed professorship demonstrates the neuroscience faculty’s stature both internally and to outside entities.
“This prestigious appointment is a momentous milestone and reflects Dr. Oviedo’s remarkable contributions and leadership in neuroscience,” said Linda Richards, PhD, the Edison Professor and chair of the Department of Neuroscience at WashU Medicine. “Her pioneering studies have deepened our understanding of how the brain processes sound and how disruptions in these processes may contribute to neurodevelopmental disorders.
“Her appointment to this endowed professorship is a well-deserved recognition of her outstanding achievements and potential to make lasting contributions to the field. We are confident that Dr. Oviedo will continue to push the boundaries of neuroscience research and inspire the next generation of scientists here at WashU.”
Her research and mentorship
Oviedo’s research is interested in decoding vocal communication. Animals depend on sounds for survival, as well as for social and reproductive interactions. Human brains face the complex challenge of quickly recognizing, categorizing and interpreting the communicative significance of sounds within noisy environments. These processes are guided by the precise neural connections that shape auditory processing.
The lab’s work explores evolutionarily conserved mechanisms for decoding social calls in the auditory cortex of rodents. While the cerebral cortex may appear structurally uniform, advanced tools for neural circuit analysis have uncovered significant differences among cortical regions responsible for distinct functions. These specialized circuits, embedded within stereotyped cortical modules, are now recognized as key elements enabling specific tasks. Her lab aims to identify these unique circuit features in the auditory cortex and understand their role in behavior.
Most recently, her National Institutes of Health R01-funded research investigates the disruption of lateralized auditory cortical function in a mouse model of Rett Syndrome, reflecting her commitment to bridging basic neuroscience with clinical applications. The long-term goal of the NIH project is to establish a pipeline to study and rescue functional communication deficits in mouse models of autism spectrum disorder to identify molecular pathways and critical development periods as targets for developing human therapeutic interventions.
Oviedo continues to benefit from her literature background in her scientific career, especially in her grant writing.
“If I don’t understand [the science] clearly, I don’t expect anybody else to,” she said. “The best advice I ever got about scientific writing is to write it so someone can understand it in an airplane with a screaming child next to them. There’s a clarity and creativity from studying literature, where the ability to be persuasive and clearly convey your ideas is essential. That’s something that I cherish, and I try to pass on to my students.”
Fostering a new generation of neuroscientists demonstrates Oviedo’s deep commitment to mentorship. Throughout her career, she has advised numerous graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and undergraduates.
“The mentorship you leave is probably your biggest legacy,” she said. “The people you mentor and how you mentor them is just as important as the science you do, and they’re interconnected. You do better science because you motivate people to work with you and give their best.
“I think that’s why mentorship is important to me. If someone doesn’t feel invested and part of the team or that they’re getting the right mentorship in the right environment, they’re not going to feel invested in the science.”