Episode 09: Laverne Melon, 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 Kori Lea-Smith, Morgan Booth, and Shreyal Gandhi, who also drafted Dr. Melon’s biography. The final editing was by Dr. Adema Ribic. The original recordings are available in Podcasts.

Dr. Laverne Melon is a professor in Wesleyan University’s Department of Biology and the principal investigator of the Melon Lab. Born in Trinidad, Dr. Melon moved to New York, US when she was nine years old. She attended Townsend Harris High School in Queens, New York, where she established the Science Research Club, whose mission is to expose high school students to science-based research in a laboratory setting. Her determination ultimately led to her volunteering in a cancer genetics lab at Columbia University, which she considers her first experience feeling like a scientist while doubling as her initiation to the racism and sexism that exist in science. Dr. Melon went on to receive her BA in Neuroscience with a minor in Women and Gender Studies from Middlebury College in Middlebury, VT.  She received a scholarship from the Posse Foundation, which also helped both her and her mother obtain their green cards. While at Middlebury College, she was a researcher in Dr. Kim Cronise’s behavioral neuroscience laboratory and a research assistant for Feminist Scholar Dr. Sujata Moorti. After acquiring her bachelor’s degree, she trained with Dr. Stephen Boehm, earning her MA from Binghamton University, and after the lab moved, a Ph.D. in Addiction Neuroscience from Purdue University as an NIH-funded predoctoral fellow.  As a postdoc, Dr. Melon joined Dr. Jamie Maguire’s lab as an NIH-IRACDA funded postdoctoral fellow at Tufts University School of Medicine. After her work in the Maguire Lab, Professor Melon landed a position as an assistant professor of biology and neuroscience at the Department of Biology at Wesleyan University, where she runs her own lab and studies the sex differences in binge drinking and divergent pathways that mediate them.

Dr. Melon, what would you say is your main scientific interest?

I study GABAergic inhibition and I am specifically interested in how the brain changes in response to things like stress and alcohol. I want to know biologically what happened to cause these changes and how we respond behaviorally to constant stress or exposure to drugs.

 Where are you from?

I was born in Trinidad and I lived there until I was nine years old. My mother had moved when I was a baby to the US, she was a nanny up here so I had not really met her until I was eight. I came up to see her once.

 Whom did you live with?

I lived with my grandmother and my father, splitting time between them.

 When would you say you got interested in science?

As a kid, I used to think a lot of the time. I would sit on my grandmother's porch, and you could look down this really big hill and see all the houses below and the highway. I would just be staring out and trying to think. They should have gotten me in a Zen meditation or something as a little kid. I didn't know what the brain was or neuroscience or anything but I've always been fascinated with human behavior and the way our brains work.

 How was your experience moving to the US?

When I was nine, I came up to the US to live with my biological mother. I hadn't really known her, and that was exciting because as a kid when a parent leaves you, you think about them a lot. I was just excited to get a chance to live with her but it was also sort of traumatic. I had been raised by my father's wife who was my mother so it was like I had to give up one mother to learn another one. I was also undocumented when I came to the US.

 How was your experience being an undocumented immigrant at the time?

As a kid, you're not thinking about these things. It doesn't really hit you until high school and you're like “oh I need papers to get a job”. I ended up working jobs where I didn’t have to show documentation. My mother lost her job because she had been working without documentation around that time. It started to get a little harder to work in that way, so I could get jobs but she wasn't always able to. It was a tough, tough time growing up in New York.

 How was your relationship with school during that time?

My saving grace was always school. I loved school, I loved my teachers. Not all of them, but there was always that one teacher (you love)-you just need one. That one teacher who was almost like a parent. I also moved a lot. I went to four different schools in the fourth grade. At each school, I would change my name to either go by Laverne or Camille, feel out if it’s a Camille or Laverne vibe. I became very adaptable. Kids made fun of me for my accent. Then I’d just listen to television and practice the American accent. I got very good at it.

 Where did you go to high school?

There was an odd system at the time. You could either go to your zone schools, or you can try and buy out of a system. Another way was to get into a magnet high school or a specialized high school. when I was moving from junior high school to high school, I knew I've got to go into a good high school because my zoned high school was not a great school. I eventually auditioned for a performing arts school and went to a performing arts junior high school. I tried out for performing arts high school later and was devastated because I didn’t get in.

 Where were you accepted eventually?

I applied for and took the exam to get into one of the science high schools in New York. There are three, and I got into Brooklyn Tech. I lived in Queens at the time. The school was far, but it was an option. I had everything set for Brooklyn Tech, but then I got into one of the most selective schools in New York called Townsend Harris. Their admission was based not on one exam but on all of your grades: your standardized tests and your class grades and attendance. However, I had terrible attendance.

 How did you circumvent not having the necessary attendance record?

Some teacher again, because teachers are amazing and we don't pay them enough! One wrote a letter on my behalf and explained what my situation was like and that my home life was a bit abnormal. Based on this, and my standardized tests and grades, I was ranked to get into the school, and that was the best thing that could have happened to me.

 How was that school?

It was very odd. It was 70% girls. There were seven black students. By the end of our first year, there were only six black girls. I don’t mind that one guy, Caleb, for leaving. We were a few months in and he was like “nope, I'm leaving this school”.

The thing that I appreciate from there is that it helped build my confidence. Most of the students were immigrants or children of immigrants, so we had very common experiences in that way. That was the time in my life when I was the most confident. We also didn't have football teams, cheerleading, and none of that. The cool kids were in the theater and the drama club, and the Science Research Club which I started with some friends.  

 Does the club still exist?

It is! I looked it up to see. The whole point of the Science Research Club was to try and get us set up with labs in the city to do research. We were sort of cold emailing labs saying “I want to be in your lab”. I got into a lab at Columbia ad realized they thought I was a college student. It was a lab that moved to the US from Italy and they didn’t know the system here. They’d get angry if I couldn’t make lab meetings at 10 when I was in school.

 How was your experience working in the lab?

It was great. I got to see what science was, and what happens in the lab. The PI of the lab set me up to work with a staff scientist. I was that person's little shadow and they weren’t the easiest person to deal with. He was straight-up racist and sexist. He told me: “you're black, and a woman. You can do one but not both”.  I remember laughing. I was 15 and I'm like “who says that to someone out loud”. I thought I was in a weird skit, but he was serious.

Did you stay there?

Yes, I did. It was such a unique opportunity. I learned about genes, how to do a blast search, talk and frame a scientific story really well. Sacrifices had to be made, but I recognize how rare that opportunity was. I stayed in that lab for about a year and a half. I remember yelling at the buddies on the phone “I've had it!” when they had me staying in the lab ‘till 10 at night. It was a great way to learn what can happen with a lab schedule.

 Were there more positives about that experience?

This helped again with my confidence and seeing myself as a scientist. I appreciate that one thing from Giorgio (the person whom I studied under). He would ask me serious questions about where the research should go. I remember writing and faxing a letter to a comparative biologist in Sweden whose work was relevant. It was a great experience to realize I had something to offer.  

 What happened after you graduated from high school?

At the end of high school, I was stressing out because I realized that a lot of scholarships require you to have documentation. I got a scholarship called the Posse Foundation. The idea is that they pay for the tuition of groups of inner-city school students to go to schools that we would not consider usually. I got the scholarship to a school in a place I'd never heard of, Middlebury College in Vermont. I thought my world was New York, New Jersey, maybe Philly, not even the rest of PA.

 Did you have to sort out your documentation?

Yes. They, unlike other institutions, helped me figure out my paperwork. I ended up getting the green card right before I got to college, which was what stood between me and getting some money from the federal government for paying for college. In my first year I was listed as an international student.

 How was your college experience?

College ended up being a really great place. It was small, but that was where my confidence really took a hit because it was very much more homogenous than I had ever experienced in the US. There were a lot of very wealthy students with very different life experiences. One of my closest friends that I started at school with, Tzu-Wei, we pooled our money to get our stuff up to Vermont and we helped each other. He's now a professor in neuroscience at Middlebury. It was great having him. Tzu-Wei is Chinese and also an immigrant. People (in class) would ask him questions and talk over me. Tzu-Wei would be like: “Laverne is tutoring me in this class, I mean, why are you asking me?”

 How did you choose grad school?

At Middlebury, I was a neuroscience major and women and gender studies minor. I did research in both departments: I worked with the chair of the Women and Gender Studies department and worked with a behavioral neuroscience lab. At the end of college, I applied to three grad school programs. I had signed to go to Rutgers to study under someone who has been another role model to me, Dr Ouma Friedman. She studies neurotrophic factors and how they’re involved in cell death and maturation, and she was amazing. However, my brother had died and I started thinking about whether I really cared about that topic. Another school I got into was Binghamton University. I was admitted to a behavioral neuroscience program and that was a chance to study something that really impacted my life and my family’s life-alcoholism. I had already signed the paperwork to go to Rutgers and then very last minute decided to take the Binghamton offer. The lab (I joined) moved to Indiana in the middle of my Ph.D.

 What do you like about the academic career path?

Academia doesn’t pay a lot, but the sort of impact that you can have on other people’s careers is really fulfilling. 

 What is your lab studying?

Under the umbrella of women’s mental health, I study how alcohol impacts our nervous system to lead to psychiatric disease and particularly anxiety and depression. I ask questions about stress and how that impacts reproductive cycling and fertility and how reproductive cycling itself and changes in the hormones across the cycle impact neuronal structure and activity. Those are the big questions under (my interest in) GABAergic signaling.

 When did this interest develop?

As an undergraduate, I studied the behavioral effects of intoxication and I’ve had a long (standing) interest in binge drinking. About 70% of binge drinking episodes actually involve adults age 26 and older. Binge drinking is drinking into intoxication, which is getting your blood alcohol level at .08: 80 milligrams of alcohol per deciliter of blood. This is about three red solo cups if you’re drinking beer in a two-hour period, or one and a half red solo cups if you’re filling that with wine in that period.  It’s easy to realize that 15% of Americans are actually not just classified as weekly binge drinkers, but as heavy or risky binge drinkers that drink 8 drinks in a session.  

 What makes binge drinking so dangerous?

We’re starting to see evidence that this sort of drinking is associated with increased vulnerability to stress and stress-related diseases.  We’ve had this association between drinking and stress for a long time in the field. We didn’t know what comes first. It seems that in some situations what comes first is drinking, and that leads to susceptibility to psychiatric disease.

 Has binge drinking gone up in the US lately?

Rates of binge drinking have been going up, but it’s mainly because women have been drinking more, so much so that the CDC had come out with this big campaign pointing to a growing problem of binge drinking in women and girls. I was interested in that because women and girls are already at an increased risk of being diagnosed with anxiety and stress-related disorders.  Of course, anyone who identifies and presents as a woman or girl is intimately familiar with many things that have nothing to do with biology that can impact the diagnosis with anxiety and stress-related disorders. However, I wanted to model binge drinking in male and female mice and use that to understand the biological factors that might be involved in the development of psychiatric diseases associated with binge drinking.

 Where does GABAergic signaling come into?

In the alcohol field, we’ve been really interested in a subtype of GABA receptors called delta for a while because it seems like it is more sensitive to alcohol. My grad work was focused on how that subtype of GABA receptor was involved in mediating ongoing binge drinking.  So I tried things like pharmacologically targeting that subtype of GABA receptor and asking if animals would drink differently with a compound that’s going to activate that receptor. I showed that was the case but it depended on the estrous phase of the animal. This was a big reason that I joined the lab that I did for my postdoc. A lot of my postdoc PI’s (Jamie Maguire) work was on how hormones interact with GABAergic signaling. I joined her lab but the project that I started first was actually a follow-up on her postpartum depression work.

 What did you work on?

We were interested in the plasticity of GABAergic signaling during the postpartum period. In a lot of mammals, the postpartum period is the period after birth or labor. There are a lot of changes in the environment when you have given birth, so you might be or reactive to environmental stressors during that time. If you stress a virgin mouse, you see this really big release of stress hormones and the opposite in postpartum females. My work in Maguire lab was addressing the mechanisms that underlie this hypoactivity of the stress response. We went on to show the involvement of GABA signaling in a specific brain region.

 Where does your interest in binge drinking come into play?

We measured anxiety in binge drinking mice and found that GABAergic signaling is really important for that anxiety-like behavior. That was toward the end of my postdoc.

What are you doing now?

In 2019 I moved to Wesleyan to set up my lab. A big part of our work still relates to plasticity in the GABAergic system during binge drinking, but we also look into the intersection of stress and drinking. We use a model of chronic stress in the mouse called chronic social defeat. So we essentially train aggressive mice, aggressive males, and aggressive females to interact with an intruder mouse. We then give them a break and alcohol. We find that we have some mice that we call stress responders that increase their drinking. We also have some mice that we call stress nonresponders, whose drinking is similar to the drinking of non-stressed mice. We are trying to understand how GABAergic signaling has changed for the stress responders versus the stress non responders, and whether we can reverse that escalation by targeting a subtype of GABA receptors (delta).

 Out of all the research you have done thus far, what discoveries or developments have surprised you the most?

 I think the changes in GABAergic signaling that we’ve seen so far and that it can happen from such little alcohol. We’re seeing changes in the protein level after a couple of weeks: one, two weeks of drinking.

Have you ever done research or considered doing research on other neurobiological mechanisms that drive sex differences in the development of disorders associated with substances that aren’t alcohol?

 I’m very interested in compounds that are legally used: nicotine, and now marijuana. Unfortunately, it’s been a little hard to get a license (in the state of Connecticut) for us to start our THC experiments.

 How do gender studies integrate into your research?

I learned along the way that a lot of our research didn’t focus on things that impacted me. 80% of pre-clinical neuroscience work uses male models, which bothered me. More directly, my interest in Women and Gender Studies from college really impacted my current approach and focus.

 What would you say is the greatest obstacle you’ve had to overcome in your research or outside of it?

 In my research, it was learning about how leaky genetic models can be. Overall, I often see myself as my biggest obstacle. That’s a constant conversation I have to have with myself.

 How have your findings contributed to improving the quality of life through treatment? Has your own research encouraged you to change any of your habits or those around you?

 For the first part, we saw that using synthetic versions of the neurosteroids that end up interacting with that GABAA receptor can shift an abnormal postpartum stress state back to a less reactive stress state and I think that’s one of the mechanisms that might underlie the compound that’s now registered by the FDA for treatment of postpartum depression. We think that a similar approach can be useful for treating psychiatric diseases associated with withdrawal from binge drinking.

For the second part: it’s not hard for me, but alcohol has made a very big impact on my family. It’s the reason that I study it and I try to speak with authority with family members. It doesn’t always work but there’s hope.

 Can you give an example of how alcohol impacted your family?

I remember being at a meeting and some scientist was talking about deficits and cognitive functions in folks who are addicted to drugs and it was framed in just this way and I thought: “you know, my father is addicted to alcohol and he has been a very successful person in my family. He had a very hard life that he got himself out of. He is super smart and very good at finding a way to get that drug. It’s not a deficit in the way that we think of a deficit. I think that it’s easy to classify some folks that you don’t want to deal with like they have some sort of problem, but I think if anything I remember my dad being on vacation here in the US and getting a job. He got fake papers, a job, and some way to maintain his drinking: it’s amazing. I think that that’s why I became more interested in the increased motivation that we see in drinkers.  

 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.