Episode 06: Julijana Gjorgjieva, PhD

The following interview was conducted in-class, during the Spring 2021 session of Hidden Figures: Brain Science through Diversity, taught by Dr. Adema Ribic at the University of Virginia. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview, transcribed by Emily Leventhal, Gina Wilson and Casey Clarke, who also drafted Dr. Gjorgjieva’s biography. The final editing was by Dr. Adema Ribic. The original recordings are available in Podcasts.

Dr. Julijana Gjorgjieva is from Kavadarci in North Macedonia, formerly known as Macedonia. As a child, Dr. Gjorgjieva developed her passion for math and natural sciences and went on to compete in the Balkan Math Olympics. As a junior in high school, Dr. Gjorgjieva participated in a year-long exchange with the Hill School in Pennsylvania, through the American Secondary Schools for International Students and Teachers (ASSIST), to further pursue her interests in math and natural sciences. After completing high school, Dr. Gjorgjieva earned her undergraduate degree in mathematics at Harvey Mudd College and conducted research in mathematical biology, specifically analyzing the susceptible, infected recovered (SIR) models and vaccination strategies for SARS. Dr. Gjorgjieva completed her master’s degree in mathematics and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. For her first postdoctoral program, Gjorgjieva conducted research at Harvard University. She completed the final two years of her postdoc at Brandeis University in the lab of Eve Marder.

Dr. Gjorgjieva currently works in the field of computational neuroscience. Her research investigates the computational and organizational factors that play a role in neural circuit formation. Specifically, her research studying how activity-dependent mechanisms, which are determined by highly structured neural networks, are formed in early development. Much of her research is conducted by analyzing sensory system formation in living organisms, primarily rodents. In order to best investigate the data, she has divided the research into three main questions: how does spontaneous activity in neural circuits lead to the refinement of sensory systems, how are these systems maintained post-development and after perturbations, and, lastly, how do the neural networks being studied affect motor behavior. Dr. Gjorgjieva currently holds positions as both an assistant tenure track professor at the Technical University of Munich, and a group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research.

Dr. Gjorgjieva, where are you from?

I originally come from Macedonia, now known as North Macedonia, in southeastern Europe. I come from a small town called Kavadarci-it's a vineyard and grape-driven region, much like Napa Valley. My family owns a small vineyard, much like most families in town.

Did you go to school in Macedonia?

I attended a high school called the gymnasium in Macedonia. Although it had fairly generic topics, like Macedonian language, foreign languages, geography, economics, and so on, most of the courses, especially in the last two years, were primarily focused on mathematics and advanced mathematics, as well as the natural sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology.

 Is this how you started in math?

To be honest, I'm not sure if it was because of kind of the environment that I grew up in or something else. I was always striving to do really, really well at school and math was just one of these really developed areas in which one could go beyond the school curriculum. And that's basically what I did. There were competitions in math, I started participating in these competitions for the first time when I was 10 years old, and I kept competing until I was 18. I took part in anything from school, to regional to national competitions to Olympics, and I even got to participate in Balkan Olympics. I never, however, made it to the international Olympics. I also took part in some physics competitions.

 How did you end up studying abroad?

In my junior year of high school, I found out about an organization that was supporting studies abroad. One could apply to several programs. For example, spending a year in the US or a year in the UK. I applied, and I was accepted after some testing and some interviewing to a program called ASSIST (American secondary schools for international students and teachers). I received a scholarship to attend a private boarding school called Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, which I could have never afforded otherwise. It was an interesting and challenging experience. I remember it being very hard: you’re 16 and can’t return home for holidays, you can’t talk to your family regularly because of the time difference, and you also have to study in a foreign language.

 Did you continue being focused on math there as well?

I continued taking mathematics and continued my interest in the natural sciences, so some of the AP courses that I took were in calculus, computer science, and physics. One of the things I also got into while there was water polo.

 Did you return to Macedonia after the program ended?

Yes, this was one of the requirements of the program. It was supposed to be a cultural and educational exchange. In the process, I realized that there's a lot more that I could achieve with what I want to do and my interests outside of Macedonia.

 Where did you go to college?

I started applying in this last year of high school to study abroad. Most of the places I applied for were in the United States. In the end, I chose to attend Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California, primarily because it is a liberal arts college heavily focused on mathematics and the natural sciences. In fact, you can only major there in math, computer science, engineering, biology, chemistry, physics. At the time, I was actually deciding between math and computer science. I was always interested in math, but I thought that maybe computer science would be a more practical major. Yet, when I went to Harvey Mudd and started taking courses, I realized that I really just want to do math.

 Why math?

It's very precise. There is one and only one answer, there is no going around about it. There are no approximations. This is something that I've always found super attractive about math. Obviously, that’s changed over the years. As I was taking more and more classes, I realized that the more advanced the classes got, the more specialized I became. And rather than problem-solving, which is something that I enjoyed greatly throughout my competition participation, I was basically asked to just prove theorems. I already knew the answer, but the point was to find a clever way to prove it. This is why I wanted to go beyond that and to use my knowledge to start addressing questions that have more like real-life relevance.

 Is this how you started in research?

Yes. I basically did a research experience every summer that at Harvey Mudd. I started doing research for the first time as a freshman. As an international student at Harvey Mudd, I was ineligible for the federally funded REU initiatives (Research Experience for Undergraduates). However, I was still fortunate to secure funding to spend research at Harvey Mudd with a mathematics professor. I was doing a research project on abstract algebra. That’s when I actually learned how to program in MATLAB for the first time. For my second summer, I found an international program called the mathematical and theoretical biology Institute (MTBI), hosted at the time at Los Alamos National Laboratory. This program was aimed at women and other underrepresented groups. That’s where I realized that biology is a field where I could apply mathematical skills and really benefit.  

What did you work on while you were in the program?

We were actually exploring the vaccination strategy for the control of SARS. If I were giving this talk probably a year and a half ago, you would have no idea what I'm talking about because nobody knew what SARS was. We worked on the original SARS that spread, you know in the early 2000s in China. This was obviously a different virus than the one that is currently paralyzing the entire world.

 What else did you work on as an undergrad?

I assume you’ve heard of Alan Turing and his work in computer science. Another thing Turing was working on was pattern formation in different physical and biological systems. I worked together with my math professor John Jacobson on studies of pattern formation on curved domains because a lot of work that has been done before had been kind of on this 2D flat sheet. The second challenge was to investigate how patterns form on curved domains that grow. We developed some mathematical techniques to demonstrate that the patterns that form on spheres of fixed size are different than the patterns that form if you gradually grow the sphere from a smaller to a larger size. We published this in a conference proceeding.

 How many papers did you publish as an undergrad?

I had published two papers as an undergraduate. I found this to be extremely useful when I was applying for graduate programs afterward.

 Where did you go to graduate school?

I had decided to go to Princeton to study applied math for my graduate Ph.D. work, but in the meantime, I had gotten a scholarship to attend a master's program in Cambridge, in Cambridge, UK. This wasn’t a Master’s program like in the US. Cambridge has something known as the Mathematical Tripos. Basically, their undergraduate is only three years (parts 1 and 2), and then the fourth year-which is actually a Master's year-is called part three. This is a relatively prestigious program and I took part in Part 3 of the Mathematical Tripos as they accepted international students. I ended up actually staying in Cambridge, both for my master’s and my Ph.D. degree.

 So you didn’t go to Princeton in the end?

No-I fell in love with Cambridge. I had already applied there for a Ph.D., but one of the prerequisites for doing a Ph.D. there was to do Part 3 of the Tripos.  Scored really high and decided to stay. This was where I took a course in computational neuroscience it was love at first sight. I also started to row while I was in Cambridge.

 Where did you go after your Ph.D.?

I moved back to the US after my Ph.D. to do my first postdoc. I spent three years at Harvard for my first postdoc-I moved from Cambridge, UK to Cambridge, US, which was very confusing for the moving company. I was part of the Center for brain science, which was located centrally on the Harvard campus. I was mentored by Haim Sompolinsky and Marcus Meister. Meister is the experimentalist, and Haim’s the theorist. For my second postdoc, I went to Brandeis in Walton, which is really close to Cambridge. I was awarded my first independent fellowship, the Swartz fellowship, and afterward I received the Burroughs Welcome Career Award. The Burroughs Award supports the transition from postdoc to an independent principal investigator. I was officially in the lab of Eve Marder, but it's the place where I began collaborating with different people, including Gina Turrigiano.

 When did you start your own group?

I have been a group at the Max Planck Institute for brain research in Frankfurt since 2016. These group leader positions are actually temporary. We are given huge startups and lots of opportunities for collaborations and progress, but the contracts are for five years with the opportunity to extend twice for two years. I am also an assistant tenure track professor at the Technical University of Munich.

 How did exposure to those groups at Brandeis, such as Eve Marder and Gina Turrigiano, and quite a lot of other female systems neuroscientists shape you as a scientist?

 While I was in Cambridge, I was actually based in the Department of Applied and Theoretical Math. My colleagues were mostly fluid dynamitists and I felt a little bit isolated. I took part one time in a summer school and met another amazing female neuroscientist, Adrienne Fairhall, from the University of Washington in Seattle. I ended up visiting her group multiple times during my Ph.D., a total of anywhere between six and eight months. I would go there a few months every year. She was sort of the first big female mentor and role model in my career that had a significant influence on me staying in the field, which's obviously very male-dominated, and encouraging me to pursue what I really want to do and to always fight.

Did you have any other notable female mentors?

Of course, Eve Marder and Gina (Turrigiano), although I think of Gina more as a collaborator, and Eve as my mentor. Both Adrienne and Eve have been incredibly supportive in encouraging me to pursue the work that I want to pursue, even if it's not the most fashionable thing that everybody works on at this moment. Encouraging me to put myself out there to go to conferences and meetings and give talks. Haim and Marcus were extremely supportive as mentors as well, but one could definitely feel a difference in the environment at Harvard. It was very competitive, we always spent very long hours in the lab, and everyone was looking at who is working harder, who is pushing for the next bigger paper. At Brandeis, there was the spirit of "let's work hard and let's make progress" in a friendly and collaborative term. Although Haim and Marcus have been great mentors, Eve and Adrienne are my role models for science and for my personal life. And this is something that I strongly recommend that everybody finds in their pursuit of future activities, people that you feel comfortable talking to about anything at any time.

We had a speaker last week and who mentioned how her female mentors were essentially more strategic about things compared to her male mentors. Is that something that you also noticed?

I don't think I disagree with that, but I'm not sure that I would say this is one thing that I noticed specifically. What I've appreciated, both from my male and female mentors has kind of been the kind of no BS mentoring, because a lot of the time you end up having fluffy conversations, and you feel like people don't give you honest advice. This is definitely something that I do not get from my mentors and something that I greatly appreciate. But in terms of the difference between male and female, I feel like with my male mentors I've mostly been discussing science, and with my female mentors, I have also been able to discuss personal life. Maybe this is where strategizing comes into play. Obviously, life is not just doing science and focusing on science. Science is important and I don't like this division between work-life balance, because, for me, my work is my life, so I don't think they should be considered as two separate things. Something that I think the female mentors have helped me with has been in terms of discussing things with me and understanding that a lot of decisions we make include factors other than "I'm going to take a job because this is the most excellent place for me to do my science", but also include kind of a more well-rounded view of everything that makes up a scientist.

Are there any advantages you found to have a background based more on mathematics as opposed to neuroscience or biology?

 You may have heard that it's more difficult to build mathematical training than it takes to learn neuroscience. I don't know if that's true, because neuroscience is also big and overwhelming. And there's a lot of very difficult conceptual and complex phenomena. I do think because the mathematical training is very structured, it's important that this is done in a structured way through courses. I think that neuroscience training and background is acquired independently, you can do it basically by reading on your own right, by reading papers, or reading textbooks. In that sense, I would say yes, it is definitely helpful to maybe enter theoretical computational neuroscience by having trained in one of the more quantitative sciences like math, or physics, or computer science, as opposed to the other way around. But this is not a must.

It sounds like you've moved around a lot in your life, especially between countries. Did you find it difficult with different experimental procedures or scientific methods going between countries? Or was it pretty much the same across the board?

I'm not sure. I don't think I would say that the aspects of the techniques were different, but the mentality was. Something I have found in Germany that I found a little bit frustrating at the beginning is that people are very serious about their holidays. When I was in the US, you always get emails on weekends and you're expected to respond after-hours to emails. Now that I'm in Germany, my students definitely don't do that. I found it very difficult in the beginning. For example, I scheduled a talk, and I didn't realize it was a holiday and that was a big uproar in my group. We ended up ordering pizza for the students and everybody was happy.

What do you see as your future goals and what do you hope to accomplish in the future as a neuroscientist?

At some point I will have to leave my Institute, which is unfortunate because I feel very happy here. I feel like I have great colleagues and a great environment and great students and everything. But at some point, I will have to move and I'm hoping to find an environment where I will be able to nurture all the kind of interests and collaborations. I think this is super important, so this is something that I definitely plan and will continue doing in my future work. We are using theoretical approaches to understand circuit dynamics and plasticity and behavior. But to do this with real relevance to how real brains work, we have to rely on experimentalists.

Which topics do you plan to pursue?

I'm very interested in these ideas about the development and formation of neural circuits and plasticity, not just synaptic plasticity and how connections change in the context of development, but also in learning. What basically makes the circuits tick. What enables them to remain stable and yet flexible? How do they still continue changing, but at the same time you don't forget things, you learn new memories, but you also don't forget old ones? These are kind of my big, big questions. These mechanistic approaches where we build the circuits from the ground up and these top-down approaches, where we just say, “okay, I want the circuit to be very good at executing a particular task, like transmit the maximum amount of information”. I'm hoping to find a way to do both and to eventually merge these two ideas together.

 Are there other ways you plan to use your science?

The last thing that I hope to achieve once I become a bit more established, and I'm already trying to do a little bit more of this now, is to really help others in ways like I have been helped. I come from a small, tiny country, and I have relied greatly on hard work, but also on being fortunate and being lucky in certain situations. Sometimes if you're unlucky, even if you're hard-working, things don't work out. I think all the things have to align and work out. I've been very fortunate to be presented with these opportunities and to have the kind of mentors and people to work with and be supported by. I constantly think about this myself when people approach me about doing internships or come for advice to me. I try to basically create opportunities or make things possible for people just like things were made possible for me in some organized way.  I'm part of a joint training program in computational neuroscience known as Smart Start at the Bernstein Center for Computational neuroscience. I was also the Equal Opportunity Officer at my Institute.

I think you've actually shed a little bit of light on this just by talking about your origins from Macedonia but do you think that such a more structured but "choiceless" education does provide some benefits versus disadvantages?

To be honest, I guess I don't know any other way. I went to a liberal arts school but Harvey Mudd was not a classical liberal arts school. It was very also math and science-heavy. I know that educators talk a lot these days about what's the right way to teach young students. Do you want to give them the freedom to explore and figure things out on their own or do you want to have a structured curriculum? And I have to say, I'm actually a fan of the structured curriculum because I went through It and I never found myself constrained or limited.  

 This interview was conducted during the Spring Session of UVA’s Hidden Figures class in 2021. Class roster:

Addis, Lucas; Ahmed, Anushey; Akram, Amman; Alam, Maisha; Anderson, Sydney; Bhatia, Rhianna; Bonagiri, Paavan; Booth, Morgan; Clarke, Casey; Fisher, Grayson; Gandhi, Shreyal; Hossain, Mohammed; Rayan; Jensen, Kate; Kim, Michael; Lahham, Zina; Lea-Smith, Kori; Leffler, Schuyler; Leventhal, Emily; Mehfoud, Matthew; Morrisroe, Erin; Pham, Twindy; Sajonia, Isabelle; Sisk, Emma; Suram, Ananya; Wang, Jessica Beth; Webster, Tessa; Wilson, Gina. TA: McDonald, Amalia. Instructor: Ribic, Adema, PhD.