Hi, welcome to the Science Fair podcast. I'm your host, Susan Keatley. I'm a PhD chemist, writer, and I love talking to scientists. On the Science Fair podcast, I aim to bring you conversations with scientists doing fascinating, cutting-edge work on all kinds of interesting phenomena, ranging from physics to chemistry, to biology, and even the nature of science itself. Tune in every Monday for a new episode. For each scientist we interview, first we'll release a mini episode that connects what the scientist is doing with what's happening in the high school science classroom and then the following week, the following interview. So come along and tune in for some science fair. Hello everyone. My name is Lucy Poll and I am a high school intern on the Science Fair podcast. Our guest today is Dr. Elizabeth Hattania, a Vanderbilt University. Dr. Hattania is a neuroscientist, associate professor, and director of independent studies in neuroscience at Vanderbilt University. She's also the director of Vanderbilt's College of Arts and Science, new college core general education curriculum. Dr. Hattania earned her BA in neuroscience from the University of Delaware where she originally started as an English major and earned her PhD in neuroscience from Vanderbilt University. She also did a post-doctoral fellowship at the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center, treatment and research institute for autism spectrum disorder. She is research how brain circuitry relates to social emotional well-being. She currently teaches courses on the nervous system development and endocrinology. Today Dr. Hattania will tell us about her research being a woman in science today in her career path. We are so happy to have her on the podcast. Thank you Lucy. It's great to be here. So hello Dr. Hattania. Can you tell us about how your passion for science originated and how you ultimately became interested in neuroscience? As a high school student I was actually very into the English side of things, of humanity side of things. And so I take science courses of course and I did have a fabulous math teacher in high school that I love to dearly and he made me love math because I went into high school not like he math and thinking I was gonna very much hate all high school math and he made me a total convert and so that was great but it did not make me a convert to the sciences in general. I took my science courses they were following but there was no passionate igniting that happened in high school and so I went to college and as you mentioned I was a English major when I started and I had had the high school I went to had a phenomenal English department with really amazing teachers and professors. We had some people that were teaching college and high school and so I think that really shaped my goals and then when I went to college I still really enjoyed all the things that I'd loved about it but I felt like something was missing I just was not as motivated by it as I'd been and so I started feeling things out and taking some other classes and then I took an introduction to neuroscience course I think I had a psychology minor maybe or maybe I even listed it as a double major for a while but one of my roommates was taking the course and I could take it as some sort of elective like it counted towards something and I thought oh it'll be so fun to take a course with a friend and that literally is the only reason I took it and I took the course and about halfway through the semester I was just madly in love and that was it and I was first semester junior I had not taken a science or math course since high school and I switched my major I took summers and winters for the next two years I graduated a semester late I did an honors thesis and I became a neuroscience major that's incredible what what was it that made you say this is it I'm not going I'm not going back and I'm going to do all this extra work in the summers and winters I don't know that's a really good question there was something about that course that ignited a passion in me that no other courses I had taken up to that point has which in my current position I do a lot of undergraduate advising and one of the things I say to students is just try stuff like don't people come in very married to what they're gonna do and I think it's so important to just you know all those gen ed courses you have to take are there for a reason because sometimes you're gonna try something that you didn't even think existed really right and cared about and then it turns out to be kind of a turning point for you so yeah for me it definitely was that's so wonderful and I'm a parent of a middle schooler and I notice other parents are stressed like my child hasn't found their thing Lucy I bet that you have no people in high school maybe there's a similar feeling of I haven't found my thing and so I think it's really wonderful and comforting to know that you don't have to find your thing you know as a as a high school or a middle school or even you know when you start college yeah I think that's a really nice story about how that you found you were passionate about neuroscience later I think in your education they think like right now so many people have no idea like what they want to do like what Susan was saying and it's a really nice story to hear that has changed so much and had that eventually like developed into such a strong passion for you I read before about how you worked for your postdoctoral work on autism spectrum disorder at Vanderbilt's Kennedy Center treatment and research institute for autism spectrum disorder and I was wondering about how you if you can share some insights from that and how it influenced your interest and approach to neuroscience I have an interesting research background in that I from the time I was an undergraduate when I did do research once I once I changed my major and got into neuroscience I have gone back and forth between working in more basic labs where we're studying animal models of human the human nervous system I'll keep it real general for now and then also working with people so I actually worked for a couple of years between college between high school and college as a research assistant at Yale in a lab that studied developmental disorders and also premature children that had been born prematurely and some of the struggles that they had and so this is a very interesting thing in the sense that you have to take you have very different perspectives on what you're studying and what it means and what the challenges are depending on where you're working so for me working in the Kennedy Center which I was already pretty involved in because of the lab I done my graduate work with was just it felt like kind of broadening my base right because by then I was very very focused on a very tiny thing that I you know we maybe we'll get into later or not but you know thinking about how do the actual brain cells in our brain do a thing right and so stepping back a little bit and saying what does this mean obviously it was different questions but same sort of concept like what does this mean for a person you know and for these kids and these families that we work with just it felt really connective to me right to be able to say hey you know look I'm looking at real people with real challenges and how do these teeny tiny questions we ask about very specific things in biology matter in life so yeah in my high school biology class we have discussed a circulatory system a lot in the digestive system we've never really got into the nervous system as it's a more complex system so could you maybe explain what the nervous system is for some of our listeners who might be unfamiliar with it the nervous system basically is the collection of cells inside your body that form the parts of your body that make up the connections in and out of our world is what I would say so you know your brain your spinal cord your nerves are the big players here right and we all kind of know what those basically are in some vague sense but what those things do is allow us to interact in the world so our sensory systems how we hear and we taste and we touch we feel that information comes in we have to do something with it which is what we do with our big brains right as humans and then we decide gosh that means I should react in a certain way so that means I'm cold I should go someplace warmer I'm scared I should go near these other people that are less scary or leave the place scary and go somewhere not scary and of course we all have much more complex behaviors language things like that but that's the basics right the basics of the way the nervous system works is it allows us to be behaving animals I know you did some research on how like on the evolution of the nervous system and how it's changed over time could you maybe adjust that I have indeed worked with not really my area but I have worked with some people that specialize in in this sort of evolution of the nervous system so basically the work that I've been involved in is looking at not so much just the general evolution of the nervous system which is definitely well out of my area of expertise but looking at understanding the nervous system better by seeing how it has evolved in different animals and so this is an area that we often would call comparative neurobiology where instead of say I'm looking at children with autism and I'm gonna study those children with autism or I want to study how autism works so I'm gonna use an animal model like a mouse who I know is very different from a human but if we study the right things and ask the right questions we might get really important information that helps us better go back and work with humans instead I am gonna look at a tree squirrel and a skunk
and a cat, and I'm gonna ask how they see and interact, and what I say see, I mean experience, how they experience the world differently, and how that shapes their reactions differently, and where are their specializations, right? So we have great vision, that is something we're pretty good at. We've got a terrible sense of smell, but our dogs have an amazing sense of smell, right? And so that's connected to us, but I mean, there are animals all over that have these insane specializations in their sensory systems that allow them to function in their environment very specifically. And if you start studying the differences between them and another animal, you start learning some generalizations about the way nervous systems are built, and then also some specializations about if you wanted to change it, how could you do it? You're mentioning like different animals, is there like a specific animal that our nervous system and brains are the most similar to? Well, I mean primates as a whole, right? Have very similar nervous systems and brains, and we are a primate. So when you look at the other primates, and there is a reason that, you know, primate research often is used when people want to ask very complicated questions that you can't ask in animals that are more different than we are. Dr. Katania, is there a technology or an approach that's been really powerful in helping scientists understand the nervous system? I think, you know, in my own work, I have done, you know, when working with humans, I have worked with MRI, so doing imaging work, right? Where we can see inside the brain of a person, which of course we could never do normally, to be able to do genetic manipulations on animals and change tiny things and the way tiny things and going down, so going from like the big picture, just what's going on to going down to teeny tiny questions about like, if you change this one tiny molecule, what happens is also very powerful to give you kind of scales, and then of course, you know, I think behavior, which is not neuroscience, right? So the study of behavior psychology, not neuroscience, but a lot of neuroscientists me included, you know, I really love behavior and behavioral work because what we are studying when we study how the nervous system works is what happens with behavior, 'cause that's what drives behavior. And so I really think that even though that's an older thing, that we all think, of course we have behavior, right? But I do think that it's very powerful in all the work I've done, whether it's been with people or with animals in clinical settings and basic settings, having that component, right, of being able to connect the way the nervous system functions to what the behavior is is really cool. And I've read that most of your training and early research focused on the development of the brain circuitry related to social and emotional function. Can you explain what brain circuitry is? Yes. A brain circuit is simply the connections between neurons. So if we get into the nervous system, right, then the neurons are one of the most important pieces of it. There are other types of cells in the nervous system, but the neurons are those cells that actually communicate with each other to transmit a signal that lets us do things. So I said, I talked about sensory, right? So we're all seeing things, we're seeing each other right now. It is the light hitting our eyes that is transmitted to a signal that our neurons then through multiple connections, get up to our brain to a place where it can interpret that signal. And then I say, okay, great, I can see you and you're smiling and that makes me happy. So I'm going to smile back. I'm going to have to make that decision. That whole thing is a brain circuit, which is these connections between neurons. And so when we think about how the brain works and how connection, why it matters, what we do, our behavior, our inputs, how we feel, all of those things are driven by brain circuits. And so without that communication piece and thinking about that level of communication between neurons, you can't really get into how things are functioning. Yeah. Kind of like how our brain connects to what we think in our eyes and our senses. Absolutely everything. So whether it's internal, so I'm thinking about something, I have to remember something, so I have to pull a memory out, which is stored somewhere that we don't yet completely understand, right, inside my brain. That's neurons talking to each other. I decide I want to tell you about it. My neurons have to talk to a place that tells me how to talk. And then they have to talk to actually all the muscles in my face so I can make the noises, right? So all of that is based on brain circuitry and how it functions. I was reading about illusions recently and it's kind of, I don't know if you've heard of like the blue, black versus gold white illusion. Oh yes. Of course. Does that relate to brain circuitry and kind of how like the neurons send signals to your eyes? Yes. So actually the opposite. So it would be how your eyes send signals to your neurons and then how your brain interprets it. So a lot of that stuff, at the level of your eyes, you have sensory neurons that are taking that light in and doing some complicated things with it. And then you have multiple synapses to get all the way up, which is the synapses that connection between neurons to a tune neurons. You have multiple of those to get all the way up to the brain. But most of the really interesting processing, what is color, where is it in space, how does it connect, how do I see out of both eyes and connect those two things and make them into one picture. All of that happens in your brain. So yeah, that is definitely pretty much any illusion. You can work through how you, we don't necessarily know how it works, but you can work through how it would work through your brain and your circuits. Yes. Dr. Katan, yeah, I was reading a study. It came, actually it was published in 2024. But it was talking about lower connectivity and strength of circuits in the prefrontal cortex and adolescents, basically their ability to be resilient during COVID. But it made me wonder, how do scientists see if there's higher or lower connectivity in circuits? How do they know that? So with humans, you're almost always using this thing called magnetic resonance imaging, which MRI. And when you're talking about connections and function, you're usually using something called FMRI, which is functional magnetic resonance imaging. And what that allows us to do, as I kind of said before, is look into the brain and look at areas that are more or less active at any one time. Now, it's not the level of a neuron, right? It's much bigger and broader. So there are lots of interpretation that has to happen. And there's things that we can't always understand. But it does let you say, for instance, if a person is looking at something or listening to something, is there more activity in this part? Or is there less activity in this part compared to someone else? And so that's a lot of the ways those questions get answered. There are other things we can do structurally. So when we're talking about the integrity of a brain circuit, we're talking about the integrity of connections between neurons. And neurons, one of the things they have to do to talk to each other is they often have this long part of the cell that is called the axon. And that gets wrapped in this fatty sheet that insulates it. And just like wires in a house or pipes in your house, right, insulation makes things work better. And so the insulation can help things work. And so there's ways to look at that, like how good is that insulation? So there's lots of other things people do to ask these questions in humans, but affirmerized probably the biggest deal. How does brain circuitry better help us understand conditions? Like autism, which I know you studied, or other conditions that people may have, like ADHD? So kind of like I said before, I am a huge convert, probably my PI in graduate school is, you know, to thank for this, that circuits are the answer, right? In other words, if we don't know how a circuit works, we don't know how the brain works, we can understand it individual neuron, and sometimes we have to do that, right? So people doing neuroscience work are working all the way from the level of genetics up to behavior at everything in between. And, but this level of circuitry is to say, how do we communicate, right? So it might be the same as saying, how are we doing this podcast? You know, how am I able to speak to you? And if we don't understand that, but there's a problem with our podcast, and like suddenly we, one of us can't hear each other, we can't problem solve, right? And so understanding the actual way that, you know, mine, I don't understand it. (laughs) But, you know, my internet is working to send me to you and vice versa, and you know, how are your phones working? And knowing all of those details would let someone come in and troubleshoot if we had a problem, right? And so the brain is similar. - I were gonna ask a question now that tries to link this as best we can to something that high school students are asked to study. According to the next generation science standards for high school, one of the life sciences disciplinary core ideas states that students should understand that multicellular organisms have a hierarchical, structural organization in which any one system is made up of numerous parts and is itself a component of the next system. So we wondered, in your research, how does this thinking about hierarchical systems possibly help you to think about the nervous system maybe also help you to ask questions, think about data, how might you use it? - You might be really interested in behavior, but if I wanna know, if I look at my dog and she's laying on the couch sleeping and then all of a sudden she gets up and she leaves the room and she goes into the next room and she lays in a bed in front of the fireplace. And I wanna understand why she did that, right? There are so many things I have to understand. Now I don't necessarily have to understand her brain, but I could want to understand how her brain work because what if I say, well, the fireplace is on and the heat's not working? And what I think happened is she got really cold and then she moved to the place that's really warm. Well, I have to do so, I can hypothesize that, right? But I'd have to ask a question if I really wanted to understand that and that would be like, well, maybe what is her temperature before and after, what is the temperature in the two rooms? Can I repeat this and have her move from a cold to a hot glue?
multiple times. So these are all behavioral questions. But then if I say, well, how does that work? Like, why did she decide when room was cold and how did she know to go to the other room? Then I have to start asking what's happening inside, right? And what happens when she starts to feel cold? And I could ask that through a brain question. And I might start general and just say like, hey, I want to do an FMRI on my dog. And I want to see if when she's cold, her activations look different than when she's warm, okay? And so we could do that. And that would be very broad. But then I might say, okay, well, there's this one area of the brain that I found area X. And it is always different when she's cold and warm. What's going on there? And so then I might have to go, okay, well, now maybe I need another animal model that I know has an that has area X in it where I can start asking very specific questions about what area X does. And to do that, I probably need to go inside and you look at cells, right? I need to see where the connections are. So back to my circuits, like what connects to area X? And where does area cat X and connections to? And then I might say what proteins are made in the neurons that are in area X, right? So neurons communicate with these things called neurotransmitters, probably lots of people kind of heard of those, even if they don't know what they mean. And different cells have different neurotransmitters and they have different receptors to talk with those neurotransmitters. So then we could look at those, right? So now we've gone from behavior to sort of broad, whole brain activation to specific area to looking at a cell to looking at proteins in a cell. And then we might want to go to the genes and say like in some animals, they don't go to the fire. And maybe they're genes, they're expressing different genes in the animals that are. And why is that? So if you think about that, right? If a system is truly hierarchical and it's this combination of putting all these little pieces together, you can't actually talk about the big thing without looking at smaller and smaller pieces at some point. If you want to answer the whole question. Yeah, I love that example you gave so much. And it actually starts to make me think of then you could even keep getting bigger into communities. Yes. And you know, so now like the entity, the organism is now part of a larger system. Absolutely. And what does and what does the community do? And have they built something around having warmer or cooler places? And why? And what does that do to the people or animals in the community? And yeah, absolutely. Now moving on to a little bit of a different topic. I was thinking a lot about women in STEM today and how that's a really growing field and how women are definitely a lot more common in science, engineering and technology fields. So I was wondering what it's like to be working in a science field today, first earlier when you did your research. And if you experienced any differences regarding being a woman or any moments of pride, working as a professor, and a mentor, and a lab. I have had an overall very positive experience as a woman in science. I don't feel like I have hit a lot of roadblocks that some people have. But also, and I think this is true, even in the last, you know, 40 or 50 years, there's been huge changes, right, that are positive. That does not mean there aren't challenges, right? So there's still a pay gap. And that's a real thing. And there are issues with things like who gets what kind of job, right? So you're right that women in science in general and STEM fields in general, there was an NSF study that was done yearly, not done anymore, but was that looked at these things and women, you know, especially considering compared to other groups and the changes in other groups, women have done much better in their increase, but it depends on where you look. So that's looking at women in any STEM field. But if you look at women, say in universities, women in tenure track positions, women in right leadership positions, then things sort of slow down again. So there's still, there's still rate inroads to be made. I think for me, the time that you asked about like being proud or, you know, is when it was my students, right? Like what I have students that are women that if I have a student that's a woman that clearly identifies with me and feels like I make her life, you know, feel like it's going to work better and more confident about what she wants to do, that's always a huge moment of pride. I was reading an article at the beginning there in my physics class about a woman named Mariam who was a scientist in the 1960s and she experienced a lot of difficulties working at a lab, so she eventually like went into teaching because of that. So I was wondering if like today you've experienced any differences like working as a teacher or working as a lab as a woman. No, I did not. In neurosciences even, I mean in STEM in general, there are more women than there used to be of it in neurosciences. Actually, we might be overrepresented in some ways, not completely, but in some ways. And so in all the labs I've worked in from the time I was an undergraduate, I have been in labs that were, you know, at least 50% women. And so I have not really had that problem. I will say I was chatting with a friend of mine that's an engineer recently and she was telling, she's just a little older than me. And so and she was telling me her trajectory and the things she's experienced and still does working in engineering with a lot more challenges and a lot more of the things that you're talking about. So it's all it is also feel specific. I know you're a mentor. So I was wondering if there's any advice you typically give to your students or you've any advice for like younger people who might be listening to this podcast like middle school or high school girls who are interested in pursuing science or specifically neuroscience. I think that you know the advice that I give students most often is to do like follow your dreams and do the things you love, which sounds so much easier to say than to do. But it can be little, right? Like I said, you take a class, you like that class, you keep going with it, you try some more things. And to not be afraid to choose a harder path if you really know it's right for you, right? So as Susan said, when I brought up what I did, you know, I took I took a little bit of a hit. My students often, you know, I have students that are very worried about graduation dates and my students are often very worried about doing anything that would mess with that. Didn't change my life very much. It feels big at the time. It feels very big, right? But gosh, if I hadn't done that, where would I be? Right? I mean, someone completely different. And so I think it's totally fine to start something and say, hey, this thing is not for me. I don't want to do this anymore. And it's also totally fine to say, find something and say, I am going to move heaven and earth, right? To make this thing happen for myself. And that, I think that's a pretty successful strategy. To be in science, you just want to, you know, take the courses that work for you right now, like as a high school student, and keep exploring the things you're interested in. So look what ways are you interested in science and what things really get you excited. And I think that's important. I think that's really good advice for high school students who are just like exploring all these different sciences by taking like different classes every year. While reading a Q&A from you, I think I found it on Instagram from a few years ago. I learned that you originally like an English major, like I talked about before and like you discussed before switching into neuroscience. And I know Susan has read in many articles and that's how I met her. And I also enjoy writing about science. I read for a science newspaper at my school. And I was wondering if you've incorporated any like humanities concepts into either like your lab work. I know you did a little bit of psychology or just like your teaching. And then also do write about science in your free time or explore any humanities fields. So I'll start with the humanities and my classes thing because no, in my research not so much although maybe as another side to the question, I did used to do some science writing. And actually while I was in graduate school, I did some science writing and I wrote a little bit for one of the magazines in our medical center that you know cover stuff. And so I did that was, it has been a long-term side in communication of science in general, right? It has been a long-term side interest of mine. And is something to get back to the classes that I put into all of my classes. So in the neuroendocrinology class that I told you about, that course is a small, was a small seminar course I'm not teaching this year. And the students, you know, they're talking all semester long. They're communicating all semester long with each other, but they do have to do a presentation at the end of the semester. In my course, my developmental neuroscience course which I'm teaching right now, for a long time I had a paper that was supposed to be written as a lay journalism article. And I do these, it's my assignment this year's a little different, but with the same idea which is, it's really, really important for students in STEM to be able to communicate with the rest of the world. And it is a huge challenge, right? Communicating science isn't easy. We use big words. We have lots of jargon. It's overwhelming and complicated and scary to a lot of people, but that doesn't mean it's not super cool. And I think it is on scientists to be able to convince people that it's super cool, right? Like it's our job. And so I do integrate a lot of that into my courses and that probably comes from my background, right? As an English major and a communicator. And also in my new role as Associate Director of our College Corps, I actually am directing one of our first year courses. It's called Science Technology Value. Every student in the college has to take it in the spring semester of freshman year. And it is basically a humanity's course about science, right? So they take one called being human in the fall and they take science, second values in the spring. And we read about science both from the perspective of scientists, but also from the perspective of humanists, or we might read a poem about science, right? And so it has been for me this huge return sort of to my college roots. And very exciting, because that's not stuff that I have thought about in many years, but now it's sort of a big part of my life. So it has really broadened the way I connect science to the rest of the world.
the world. Yeah, so every undergraduate has to do this. So we just rolled out the curriculum amazing. Yeah, and wonderful. One year long first year course and that everybody takes. So we create a common intellectual experience where students are, they have different instructors. We have we have faculty teaching from every division of the school, which means humanity, social sciences and sciences. So you might take the course with a chemistry professor or an art history professor or an English professor or me. So every student is going to have a different experience. The professors are going to come with different lenses on the material. Sure, yeah. But you're reading the same things, which allows them to then go out and have conversations about these sort of, and we try, we've built the course around big topics that are big problems and big questions, right? And so, you know, can you have that conversation with your dorm maid or the person you're having lunch with and things like that? That's the goal. That is so wonderful. And I actually think that's wonderful for science majors. I about a month ago, we had a woman on the podcast who is a lecturer at Princeton in molecular biology. And she teaches a course for majors, and then she teaches a course for non majors. And her non majors class sounds a little bit like what you're describing, sort of like important issues in science and society. And as she was describing it, I thought, I really could have used that. Like I was a chemistry major. I was just like so embroiled in the details. And it would have been really wonderful at that age to step back and think, what are the big issues? So I love that all of the undergraduates have to take this. It sounds so unique. Is that happening in other places? There, I mean, there are multiple universities that have first year common curriculum courses. I don't know that there is one that is built like this. There are some that have more of us that maybe do multiple courses like us that have more of a science focus on some of them, right? And not others. So it wouldn't be all, but it would be for some. I think the way I think about ours is much like you said. I think for our students coming in thinking they're going to be STEM majors because nobody's in major when they come here, right? You're undeclared when you start a Vanderbilt. Right. For students that think they're going to be STEM majors, it helps them broaden and think about what the importance is of thinking about these other fields and how they can connect that to their own field. And for students that aren't STEM majors, right? That think science is scary and terrible. It lets them think about it in a broader way. First of all, maybe to have an experience with it that isn't bad because I really do feel like for most students that think science is terrible. It's past experiences, right? Science is terrible. I promise. And so, you know, I think we can make it a little less scary because there might be a student in my class that should be a STEM major and isn't thinking about it. And so maybe I can open up that little crack of passion, right? That I had to find halfway through my college career earlier. And then for the students that already have it, they get to say, oh, I actually do love chemistry. But boy, do I want to think about how it affects the way society manages pandemics or whatever, right? And so they're thinking about this big broad thing that they haven't thought about before. And that might affect the direction they go. And maybe they also find a little crack, right? That is like, oh, but what I'm really passionate about is this. So yeah. They've like related to what's used. I'm just asking. I know a lot of high school students right now are thinking about college or college students listening to this podcast. I have to like declare a major. I was wondering if there's any majors that are kind of an intersection between science and humanities. Sure. So we have here a department called Communication of Science and Technology. So we also have, you know, an English department, an English department and English major. And we have a communications major. But this is specifically about communicating science and technology. And I will say because I have quite a few majors that double major, they do an amazing job and the work that they create and they're a validity to write and communicate sciences phenomenal. So that's a great, that's one great example. I think getting outside of, so and I think from neuroscience perspective, that's just a major that my students tend to really frequently double major in, right? But there's lots of other ways. So we have a major here called Medicine Health and Society. Now this is more an intersection between the social sciences and the sciences than just the sciences and humanities. But again, that's saying, you know, am I going to connect these very detailed kind of STEM courses that I take to much bigger broader societal questions and policy questions and things like that. And then we also have a new major here that is sort of focusing. It's again, also kind of a combination between it's kind of all three. I mean, it's really looking like it. There's a big history focus because it came from a department that used to be American studies, but now they sort of are looking at connecting across kind of big questions that need to be answered using multiple disciplines. So there's history, there's social sciences, and sometimes there's sciences because there might be like sports medicine questions and things like that. That's just one example. Yeah. Kind of like going back to what we were talking about before. I was wondering if like other than teaching that class, of course, do you write about science or like explore humanities fields at all in your free time other than in your career? No. No, my career takes most of my time. And so most of the reading I do is related either to my work in neuroscience or I should say my work teaching neuroscience or my work teaching or developing things in the core. And that's a pretty that's a pretty broad. I mean, I'm actually very happy because of that, which is to say that gives me this big broad thing to do. And I am now working with, you know, history professors and wall professors and French professors and like you name it. And so I'm getting exposed to all these texts and ideas that are very important to their field and being able to think differently about how we both approach doing our work and doing research and doing that. And it's amazing really. I have a question. It made me think are there any great books on neuroscience that you might recommend for high school students, young people, you know, kind of like nonfiction, but for like a more lay audience? So yes, there are lots and lots of great books going back to, but they aren't necessarily like, oh, this is on this part of the brain or the whole brain. So this is a wonderful book. But you know, good science rating is there's a lot of good science rating in the world. So depending on your interests, there is a book called Beak of the Finch, which is about the work that two very famous scientists have done on the Galapagos Islands with one of Darwin's big findings, Gabbain and Factor Darwin. So we're in evolution now. So if your interest is evolution and how does evolution work? One of the work that Darwin did included looking, of course, a lot of the Galapagos Islands. And one of the things he realizes that there are these Finches that have very different, that are different species and very different Beaks. And those Beaks have evolved and they evolved very, very quickly because of the pressures on the islands. And this book is about their work and it's beautifully written, but it's written for a lay audience. So if you're interested in evolution, that's a great one. There is a book called Why Zeebrows Don't Get Allthers, which is written by a very famous Neurontocrinologist, which is all about how the stress system works. And so if you're interested in how the stress system works, that's a great book. And trying to think there's anything else on the top of my head. I mean, there are so many, but you know, gosh, I don't know if I can come up with too many right now. I think those two are great. But yeah, I really like that. I love reading about science. I read the Henry out of Laxburg, so that's a good one there. I think that kind of also goes into a little about law for and also ethics as well as like the science answer. Do you have any advice for high school students interested in science and humanities? I know we already talked about that a little bit or like people who feel like they have to pick one, I think at my school. We have like two different pathways. One is like the science research pathway, one is like the technology pathway, and then one is like a global pathway. So people really feel like I think at this age that they definitely have to pick one. So do you have any advice for like navigating that? I think I mean students come to us and we're like don't pick, right? And they come in like I'm majoring these three things. And we're like no way, you know, take a break because you're too young to know. And I think like if ever I mean I use my example of my experience all the time and it just luck I guess, right? But then I get to say like I clearly had no idea, right? I thought I was an English major and it turns out I'm a neuroscientist. And people go the other way too, right? And that's also fine. But you have to leave yourself the space to want to do it. But that doesn't mean you know if you have to pick a pathway for high school, you pick the pathway, but you can pick the pathway and do that thing. Like I'm going to do this thing well right now and learn all about it. That's great. There's something wrong with that. That doesn't mean at the next step that you're stuck, right? And I think that's one of the things. I think students come in like I've done this now I have to do this and it's nice to say if you really don't you can wait to halfway through and change your mind. And also you can change your mind later, right? I mean you can graduate with a major in something and you don't have to necessarily go do that thing. Now it's possible that you might have to take a few extra classes or something here or there. So you know had I not taken any STEM courses and then I decided I wanted to go to graduate school and neuroscience. I clearly would have had to go on back and take in all these basic courses, right? Because that minimal you'd have to have. But I had done that if I really wanted to, right? Or if I decided partway through graduate school, which I had a moment where I thought I'm going to leave this and go do science writing, I could have
done that, right? I mean, I kind of started that way and then changed my mind and went back. But, you know, I don't think you should lock, especially at your age. You should lock yourself in because you can change paths. And now looking at me now, almost full circle, right, where probably half my job, maybe not quite half, is managing a general education curriculum that's very humanities focused, right, for college students. So things change over time and you just keep following the things that you are excited about and that you're passionate about. That's really fantastic. I was just wondering if there's any like current neuroscience research that you find particularly fascinating. One of the things in neuroscience that's really interesting right now is that, you know, gosh, I mean, probably it was 2009. I can't remember when the first paper came out. This idea of brain organoids where they basically grow up cells from humans into what we would call a mini brain. And they are getting better and better and better at creating more and more actual functional brain parts, which allows us to get closer to functional circuits, right, and things like that. And so as that gets better and better, it allows us two things. One is it allows us to ask questions about humans. So I talk about all this animal research and we've learned a million things about how the human brain works from animal research on animals very different than us. And you can definitely do that. And it's important to do because there's lots of reasons that certain models are better than others for certain things. But we have a very interesting and unusual brain and there are some things that just aren't the same in any other animal. And so being able to do this allows us to do that. It also allows us to use less animal models, which has some pluses. And it also, I think eventually, there's some of this going on already, it's going to allow us to think more about personalized medicine and personalized outcomes, because they can actually take cells from a human and revert them into some cells and then grow the brain, little mini brain. And if they can do that, they can say like, what's wrong in your brain, right? Like, is there something we can change here to make this better? Whether it's a disorder, like a neuropsychological disorder or a more, whether you know, cancer, whatever it is, right? That isn't working. Can we figure out what this is and what's driving it and sort of change that? So I do think that's, it's not an area I know I know a ton about, I know a little bit about it because of my developmental work, but I do think it's like a fascinating, it will be a fascinating way to kind of change the way we think about research and how we understand human brain function. And development, which is what my interest in it is over time. Yeah. That is so, so super exciting. Thank you for sharing that. Um, I think that's all that I was wanting to ask, but I want to thank you so much for coming on to the show. I think your research sounded very interesting, and I really like the conversation we had about the intersection between science and humanities. I think you gave a lot of really good advice. Oh, well, thank you. And thank you for having me. I really enjoyed talking to you. It was lots of fun to kind of go down memory lane and talk about all these connections, that I don't think about all the time. Thank you for listening to today's episode of Science Fair. Please rate and review the podcast on the podcast player of your choice. Also, please fill out a listener feedback form. You can find a link to the form in the show notes of this podcast or on the Science for Podcast website. Also linked to in the show notes. Finally, we are looking for episode sponsors. If you are interested in sponsoring an episode in exchange for us giving air time to your favorite cause, send an email to the science fair
[email protected] with the words sponsor in the subject line. This podcast is the work of me Susan Keatley and a fabulous team of interns. We have high school intern Lucy Poll sound editing intern Torin Gurbaz and episode production intern Sierra Rebels. (upbeat music)
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