School of Animal Sciences Faculty Spotlight: Kathryn Medler
October 7, 2025
Kathryn Medler
Professor, Neurobiology
What are you working on now?
Our lab studies cell signaling using taste receptor cells as a model. These are the cells in your mouth that detect the chemicals in potential food items and then send an appropriate signal to the brain for processing. We study how those signals are formed in the taste cells and the factors that affect them. We typically use the mouse as a model system, but since joining the School of Animal Sciences, we are now developing the ability to study taste in pigs.
What excites you most about your research today?
We identified a previously unknown taste cell type that I am eager to learn more about and to investigate how it contributes to taste perception.
I'm also excited to learn more about the pig taste system, as pigs have an extremely high number of taste buds, which indicates they have a very sophisticated taste system. So far, nothing is known about how their taste cells function. We may learn lots of new things about taste by studying it in a different animal.
Circumvallate taste papillae are the large, dome-shaped bumps on the tongue that hold taste buds. This one is from a three-week old piglet.
"Our work has important implications for anything related to nutrition, whether human or livestock."
Were there any mentors, books, or classes that deeply influenced your academic direction?
As an undergraduate at Texas A&M, an animal physiology class caught my interest because it was focused on how things work and how things work differently in different types of animals. Initially, I was focused on reproductive physiology, but taking a neurobiology course during my Ph.D. at Louisiana State University changed my research interests to neuroscience. My lab is focused on understanding cell signaling which is incredibly complex and controls how cells respond to stimuli. I am very interested in understanding cell signaling which is incredibly complex and entirely controls how cells respond to stimuli. The taste system is a fantastic model to study signaling due to its complexity and diversity of signaling mechanisms.
How does your work connect with the world outside of academia?
Our work has important implications for anything related to nutrition, whether human or livestock. Many food or drink companies decide how to formulate their products based on taste research. If it doesn’t taste good, it is not going to be eaten. This is also true within livestock production, but how feed tastes has received less attention from the industry. Hopefully, our work with pigs will begin to change that.
Our work is also relevant to human health. People undergoing chemotherapy often complain of taste dysfunction, which can cause significant weight loss and the elderly often have taste deficits that can result in malnutrition. Understanding how the taste system works will provide avenues to address these health problems.
What do you wish more people understood about your area of study?
Taste is the one sensory system that is present in all organisms and is critical for survival. Taste functions to identify good things to eat and potentially harmful things to avoid. If your taste system doesn’t work, you could eat something that would make you sick, or not eat enough of something that you need to be healthy. Taste is also directly linked to satiety, so if it is not functioning correctly, it can lead to health issues such as malnutrition. Problems with the taste system have also been strongly linked to obesity. Oftentimes, people don’t think about the importance of taste and take it for granted. Consequently, not as much research has focused on understanding how this system works, and there are still a lot of things we don’t understand about how it functions.
