about me
Hi! My name's Hazel. I'm a Southern trans lady who asks animals how they sense and process the world around them. I got my start studying animals' sensory worlds in Dan Speiser's lab at the University of South Carolina, where I worked from 2015 to 2018.
I joined Ken Lohmann's lab at the University of North Carolina in 2018, and since then I've studied magnetoreception in the Caribbean spiny lobster.
When I'm not doing research, you can find me making proper (South) Carolina barbecue & fixings.
research
I study how animals turn the noisy sensory world around them into useful signals that help them survive. Since 2018, I’ve studied how Caribbean spiny lobsters sense and process the magnetic field. For someone as focused on processing as I am, this may seem a bit of an odd choice. While we know that many animals sense the Earth’s field and use it to navigate, we have not identified–let alone characterized–a receptor for this sense in any of them. My research uses a combination of computational neural modeling, behavioral assays, and robotic instantiation to study this “receptorless” sense.
By embodying falsifiable hypotheses in computational & robotic models and seeing how well these models predict real animal behavior in the field, I’ve been able to shed light on the spiny lobster’s magnetic sense.
publications
Nichols, Havens, & Taylor. 2022. Sensation to navigation: a computational neuroscience approach to magnetic field navigation. J. Comp. Physiol. A. doi: 10.1007/s00359-021-01535-w
Havens, Kingston, & Speiser. 2021. Automated methods for efficient and accurate electroretinography. J Comp. Physiol. A. doi: 10.1007/s00359-021-01476-4
Taylor, Lohmann, Havens, Lohmann, & Granger. 2021. Long-distance transequatorial navigation using sequential measurements of magnetic inclination angle. J. R. Soc. Interface. doi: 10.1098/rsif.2020.0887
Kingston, Lucia, Havens, Cronin, & Speiser. 2019. Vision in the snapping shrimp Alpheus heterochaelis. J. Exp. Biol. doi: 10.1242/jeb.209015
Lang, Xing, Brown, Samuvel, Panganiban, Havens, Balasubramanian, Wegner, Krug, & Barth. 2015. Neural stem/progenitor cell properties of glial cells in the adult mouse auditory nerve. Sci. Rep. doi: 10.1038/srep13383
contact me
Don’t be a stranger! If you’d like to chat lobsters, neural models, or Carolina cooking, send me a message.
havens.hm [at] gmail [dot] com
