UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — On March 20, during Brain Awareness Week, Nikki Crowley, associate professor of biology and of biomedical engineering, Huck Chair in Neural Engineering and director of the Penn State Neuroscience Institute at University Park and Santhosh Girirajan, T. Ming Chu Professor of Genomics and head of the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology visited The Village at Penn State, a local senior living community. There, they answered questions about their work at Penn State.
An excerpt of their Q&A session is below.
Q: What was your “aha” moment that led you to study neuroscience?
Girirajan: In 2001, while I was in the final year of my medical training in India, I read about the Human Genome Project at the library while returning from work at the hospital. The same day, I overheard my next-door colleague say, “Genetics is the future. This is it. We are going to figure out everything.” That moment ended up sticking in my head, so I ended up going home to my parents and telling them, “I don’t want to practice medicine anymore. I want to be a scientist.” This led me to my first research job as a technician, followed by a doctoral degree in the U.S., and then there was no looking back.
Crowley: When I was younger, I thought that I wanted to be a mental health counselor or maybe do social work. As I was doing my undergraduate degree in psychology and statistics, it was challenging for me to understand why some mental health treatments would work for some people and not others. This eventually led me to working at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and wanting to become a neuroscientist. After working at the NIH, I felt very dedicated to bridging the language between mental health and basic biology which led me to getting my doctoral degree in neurobiology. Throughout my career I’ve grounded my work in my original interest in mental health and my desire to help people with mental health disorders.
Q: What is it like working on neuroscience research at Penn State?
Girirajan: My neighbor works on neurodegenerative disorders, which is on the opposite end of what I’m studying, which is neurodevelopment. Also, today, we can tell from developing brains and the genetics of a baby if that person is going to be susceptible for Parkinson's, Alzheimer’s, or even ALS. My brain has expanded in the last 15 years working at Penn State. The reason for this growth is because at Penn State we have geneticists, neuroscientists, biophysicists, statisticians, computational biologists and machine learning experts that we interact with all the time. Working with all of these different scientists helps us think through our own scientific questions from multiple angles.
Crowley: So, I come from a different background than Santhosh, but we still ended up at the same spot. And that’s at the heart of neuroscience at Penn State in the Eberly College of Science. I think it’s so cool how interdisciplinary Penn State is and that we each bring our different backgrounds together to solve similar problems. We all have this shared desire to take different perspectives to answer questions together. What we have in Eberly is very special.
Q: What is the ideal brain?
Girirajan: There’s no ideal brain. In the context of my research, where we study families and perform family-based studies, when there’s an affected child with a neurodevelopmental disorder sometimes there’s a sibling, we can compare them to. They grow up in the same environment, eat the same food, and experience the same type of parenting. That’s the best control we have in order to understand “ideal” and “not ideal” brains in the context of that family.
Crowley: I love this question because I think about it all the time. To me, it’s difficult because you’re taking an ethereal question of “what is the best wellness or brain health?” and you’re trying to make it biological. There are two things I think about a lot. The first is that it’s extremely culturally defined. What we think an optimized sort of member of society looks like depends a lot on what society we’re looking at. The second is that in my research, an optimized brain is a flexible one. When we think about people who are high-performing or kids who are functioning really well, there’s often an intense amount of ability to be flexible. So, for my own work, one of the questions we’re chasing down is, “how do you have the optimal range of flexibility of thought?”
Girirajan: It also depends on the culture and the context in which you are considering this question. Ultimately, though, an ideal brain is a happy one.
Q: What opportunities do undergraduate students have in neuroscience research and where do they go after?
Girirajan: In my lab at Penn State, I’ve trained about 85 undergraduate students, and they have stayed up to three years. Many of these students are coming with different backgrounds, but all of them have a lot of motivation. In my lab they get experiences and skills working at the bench, doing cell-culture work, and learning how to code and analyze genomic data. I just want to try and help them get into professions where they can be happy — whether that ultimately is a research-based position or a different position all together. It’s very heartening to see students go on to have successful careers after working in my lab.
Crowley: We have a brand-new undergraduate major, the neurobiology degree. There’s a lot of value to having research experience, whether they’re going to be a physician, work in health care or even be a congressperson, we want them to be able to understand causality and know how to work with and analyze data. So many of the labs within the Penn State Neuroscience Institute have undergraduates working in them. I personally, probably have six to 12 undergraduate students in my lab at any given time. We try to meet them where they’re at, so we don’t turn students away because of their major or because of what their background is. We try to help them get the skills and experiences they need for what they want to do after college.
About Brain Awareness Week at Penn State
The Q&A session at The Village was just one way the neuroscience research and teaching community at Penn State celebrated “Brain Awareness Week,” a global public health movement created by the Dana Foundation in 1996 to help highlight science and public health issues about the brain. This year, the week ran from March 16 through March 22.
The week started by giving residents of The Village an opportunity to take a tour of the Huck Institute of the Life Sciences’ High-Field Magnetic Resonance Imaging Core Facility in Chandlee Laboratory. After their tour, visitors listened to a talk from Laurel Seemiller, a postdoctoral scholar in the Crowley lab. In her talk, Seemiller gave an overview of the Penn State Neuroscience Institute (PSNI), highlighting the breadth of PSNI as well as ongoing research.
Since its founding in 2003, as a cross-campus neuroscience initiative between Penn State University Park and the College of Medicine, PSNI has grown to have over 125 affiliated faculty at the Penn State University Park campus with over 75 graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and staff. Each year, over 350 undergraduate students also participate in PSNI research opportunities.
“At PSNI we have four main research pillars: neuroecology and evolutionary neuroscience; healthy aging and neurodegeneration; neural engineering, biodevices and AI applications; and mental health, addiction and brain development,” Seemiller said. “These diverse research areas have provided me and other trainees with a uniquely interdisciplinary training environment.”
In addition to in-person programming, the Eberly College of Science and Huck also published several videos related to the week.
- Janine Kwapis, Paul Berg Early Career Professor in the Biological Sciences, and Nikki Crowley debunked common brain myths.
- Patrick Drew, associate director of Huck and professor of engineering science and mechanics, of neurosurgery, of biology, and of biomedical engineering, talked about how sleep affects the brain, and Nikki Crowley gave an overview of the importance of Brain Awareness Week.
- Sindhu Baskar, a neuroscience graduate student, in Grayson Sipe’s, assistant professor of biology, lab presented on the “Science of the Brain” at the Schlow Centre Region Library.
- Several researchers in the college also shared why they study neuroscience.