Stories of Women in Neuroscience

As an undergraduate, Lucina Uddin found her calling for studying the neural bases of self-cognition via a self-described “process of elimination.” As a child of Bangladeshi immigrants, Lucina prized a career in medicine and started on the pre-med track. However, she found herself more engaged by questions of human intelligence and consciousness than excited by the path to medical school. With the...

Dr. Talia Lerner knows that life as a scientist takes both dedication and risk. Talia began her career in science at Yale, where she was both brilliant and shy, struggling to muster the courage to ask to join labs for undergraduate research experience. However, her courage paid off and led her to a senior thesis in biochemistry then a productive PhD studying synaptic plasticity in dopamine systems...

Whether it’s walking down the runway or running an assay in the lab, Dr. Aya Osman lets her creativity thrive in her work. As a student in the UK, Aya followed her scientific curiosities through college and earned in biochemistry, all the while pursuing a modeling career. Ultimately she chose a career related to science, working in public health policy in England. However, she couldn’t quench her...

Throughout her career, Dr. Ann Hermundstad has found ways to merge creativity and technical expertise to excel in science. As a child, she loved art, writing, and math, but without a clear career path into the more traditionally creative disciplines of writing and art, she decided to pursue an engineering degree at the Colorado School of Mines. In her engineering classes, she learned there was mor...

In this episode, Nancy interviews Preeya, a Postdoctoral fellow at UCSF & UC Berkeley (joint program) who develops technologies that help with rehabilitation in disorders that affect the motor system.

Persistence, fastidiousness, and compassion. Dr. Letisha Wyatt’s career exemplifies how these qualities can fuel a successful trajectory in neuroscience. As a first generation student and a Black woman, Letisha is no stranger to the obstacles encountered by many young scientists. After studying neurobiology as an undergraduate while working full-time to support herself, Letisha ventured into pharm...

Dr. Carsen Stringer’s passion for science has manifested in a career rich with moments of creative brilliance. Starting as an undergraduate, she mused about the utility of chaotic systems to understand the vast neuronal networks in the brain, an insight she followed into her PhD at University College London. Her decision to combine computational approaches with behavioral experiments and large-sca...

Dr. Maria Lehtinen’s interest in human behavior was sparked during high school prompting her to want to become a psychiatrist. However, in college, she found the current psychological theories very unsatisfying and wanted to instead understand the brain. She switched to the newly started neuroscience major and joined a neuroscience research lab. Towards the end of her undergraduate years, as she p...

Dr. Gabrielle Gutierrez’s plan to become a physicist changed unexpectedly. While she was a physics major looking into PhD programs, she serendipitously attended a neuroscience seminar where she discovered that physics can help us understand the brain. This experience marked the start of her career in theoretical neuroscience. During her PhD at Brandeis University, Gabrielle used a simple animal mo...

Rather than by focusing on a single outcome--landing a tenure-track position and starting a lab--Marina has navigated her career trajectory by following her interests wherever they have led her. After completing a high-school internship in a science lab, Marina realized that she loved being at the bench and didn’t want to leave! This passion guided her journey through her Ph. D. studies at Rockefe...

Nancy’s interest in the brain didn’t originate in a science classroom; it instead came from reading Oliver Sacks’s book Musicophilia and his other essays about music and the brain. Following in Oliver Sacks’s footsteps as a neurologist, Nancy also decided to pursue neurology as an undergraduate. After joining a neuroscience lab, though, Nancy quickly fell in love with research and decided to pursu...

During her sophomore year at UC Berkeley, Dr. Nanthia Suthana was feeling lost and unsure of what she wanted to study. She made the brave decision to leave school and embark on a journey of self-discovery, determined to find her passion. For the first time in her life, Nanthia began reading for pleasure rather than school. After reading about famous figures in neuropsychology, her academic spark r...

Dr. Verónica de la Fuente’s passion for studying the brain was sparked over the course of a three-day neuroscience workshop at Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA) when she was an undergraduate, and that spark never faded. Upon her return from the workshop, Verónica immersed herself in neuroscience classes and began working in a neuroscience laboratory at UBA where she stayed to earn her Ph. D. As a...

Dr. Sheena Josselyn’s five-year plan is simple: “Just keep going for five years!” Her vibrant personality and zest for neuroscience research are contagious, and her interview with Nancy highlights both her brilliance as a scientist and her warm sense of humor as a human being. She explains her early research stint working with rodents as a Ph. D. student and transitioning to clinical populations i...

Dr. Deb Karhson had grown up always asking questions and diving deeply into anything that interested her. In particular, her brother’s autism made her wonder about atypical brain function and how she could improve his quality of life. Her boundless curiosity about the autistic brain sparked a trajectory of events that led Deb to join Dr. Edward Golob’s lab at Tulane during her Ph. D.. Rather than...

Dr. Athena Akrami hadn’t heard of neuroscience until she came across an article on artificial neural networks as an undergraduate. She wondered whether she could build a brain herself--and went on to build the first brain-computer interface in her home country, Iran. Her subsequent years as a Computational Neuroscience Ph. D. student and postdoc were spent in Trieste, Italy, where she used attract...

Dr. Heidi Johansen-Berg’s interest in neuroscience was surprisingly realized through philosophy and psychology classes at university, where she indulged her curiosity about human behavior and humanity’s fundamental questions. She eventually moved deeper into experimental psychology and empirical research, entering a Neurosciences Ph. D. program at Oxford University. During her graduate years, she...

Dr. Heather Snell is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She didn’t initially love neuroscience in college and instead went to graduate school to study cancer biology. However, after a fascinating rotation in a neuropharmacology lab and her subsequent thesis research studying the role of a GABA-A receptor in diabetic retinopathy, she came to fully love the brain. Afte...

Dr. Moriel Zelikowsky is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Utah. Though she started off wanting to study film as an undergraduate, she loved thinking about big questions about human cognition and soon gravitated toward a major in philosophy. After graduating with her B.A., she did her Ph. D. in psychology with the idea that experimental psych...

Dr. Brandy Tiernan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the Western Carolina University. She was destined to be a scientist from a young age, where playtime involved designing and conducting her own little botany experiments and where she eagerly took on the role of research subject for her older sister who was studying psychology. Fast-forward to her post-college years, Br...

Shreya is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the University of Florida. Although her Master’s Degree is in Biomedical Engineering and her Ph. D. is in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, make no mistake--Shreya is also a neuroscientist through and through. Throughout her career, from working as an undergraduate on the Blue Brain Project to her Ph. D. a...

Denise is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai whose interest in the brain ironically took hold as she was interviewing for law schools. When she realized she was more interested in how the brain makes decisions rather than the judicial implications of those decisions, she hopped on the Neuroscience train and never looked back. For...

Asma is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the UK Dementia Research Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland studying interactions between astrocytes and blood vessels in disease. In her interview with Catie, Asma shares her journey that has spanned multiple disciplines and three countries, including initially wanting to study psychology in college at Boston University and moving to Vancouver for her graduate resea...

Alison is a Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences and Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University. Long before she established her lab seeking to understand mechanisms underlying synaptic plasticity, though, she dabbled in a variety of experimental questions--anything that piqued her curiosity. Even at age 7 with a keen interest in ESP, she was designing exp...

Anita is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute whose research looks at the interaction between taste and smell in the fruit fly. In particular, she discovered that hungry fruit flies are attracted to acetic acid but averse to this same stimulus when they’re well-fed, suggesting that hunger can change the valence of a taste stimulus. Anita describes...