Episode 19: Elizabeth Quinlan, PhD

The following interview was conducted in-class, during the Fall 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 Sareena Miley, Bailey Bennett, Hannah Mollin, Daniel Nguyen, Emilu Englander-Fuentes, and Marshall Pest, who also drafted Dr. Quinlan’s biography. The final editing was by Dr. Adema Ribic. The original recordings are available in Podcasts.

Dr. Elizabeth Quinlan is a Clark Leadership Chair in Neuroscience and the Director of the Brain and Behavior Institute (BBI) at the University of Maryland in College Park. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Iowa, and her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Chicago. For her postdoc, she first trained at the University of Virginia and then at Brown University with Dr. Mark Bear. A major focus of Dr. Quinlan’s lab is the study of brain plasticity, particularly sensory-deprivation induced plasticity. Her laboratory found that brief dark exposure (visual deprivation) restores juvenile plasticity to the adult brain, highlighting the importance of environmental manipulations for increasing brain plasticity.

Dr Quinlan, where did you go to school?

I grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and I went to high school at Amos Alonzo Stagg.  It’s a school named after a famous Chicago football coach, about 25 miles southwest of downtown.

When did you start thinking about science?

I went to the University of Iowa to do my undergrad. One of the things that the University of Iowa is most famous for is the Writers Workshop. My first professional ambition was to be a writer, so I wanted to bask in the limelight of the Writers Workshop. But-I always read a lot of psychology so when it was time to declare a major, I declared psychology as my major. In my third year of psychology, I took a course called neuroscience for non-neuroscience majors and that changed everything. It introduced to me the fact that you could the quantitative approaches that geneticists and cell biologists have applied to problems in genetics and cell biology to understanding human nature, memory, personality, and psychosis. I remember thinking, well, I have to start over. I ended up graduating with was a BS in psychology and a minor in biology. There were no neuroscience majors at the time.

Were you involved in any undergraduate organizations? Did you get any major awards or recognitions while you were in college?

I did not get any major awards or recognitions when I was an undergrad. I did work in a lab, that of Stanley Kater, a famous neuroscientist at the University of Iowa who discovered growth cones. Growth cones are the extending end of an axon. The environment and environmental cues tell the growth cone either to grow toward one direction or away from a target. That was the first time I had the experience of being in a lab with a shared goal and a shared mission. I also had a job-I went into the hospital at night, sat in an office, and typed dictation. I was also a part of a tug of war team, completely by accident. I was complaining to a friend that I was from the pushups I did, and her boss came out of his office and immediately started persuading me to join his tug of war team! We toured all over Europe competing, and it was a lot of fun.  

Did you attend AP classes when you were in high school?

My high school didn’t offer AP classes, but I did take honors classes in biology and chemistry.

Did you always know that you wanted to be a scientist?

My parents would say that they were not surprised by my choice because I competed in science fairs in high school, but I think I was surprised. My first professional ambition was to be a writer and it wasn’t until much later that I realized I wanted to be a scientist. I like to write, which has served me well as a scientist. It is extremely important to know how to communicate your ideas as a scientist.

What did you do after graduation?

I went straight to grad school-I could not wait! I was fortunate to be broadly trained: I've done some biochemistry, cell biology, a little bit of molecular work, and some physiology. However, when I was in grad school, I learned that physiology was the thing that I was most excited about. Physiology is really hard ‘tho-you have a very personal relationship with your experiments because they happen in real-time. Every minute of the experiment, you're getting feedback, things are going well, it's going to be a good day. Things are not going well, and you think “What am I doing wrong?” You leave at the end either feeling elated or defeated because you could not get any good neurons to record from. Because of this, after I got my Ph.D., I wanted to try something different. I did my first postdoc at the University of Virginia, where I worked in a cell biology lab. The experiments have many stages where you can simply put your sample in the fridge and go home! There is no real-time feedback like in physiology, but you are always running multiple experiments, so your feeling of self-worth isn’t suffering as much. As much as that was easier to deal with, I missed the physiology-I missed sitting in front of the computer and watching how neurons work in real-time.

How did you choose your postdoc labs?

I had been reading a lot about cortical plasticity as a graduate student and those are the papers that I was the most enthusiastic about. I approached one of the authors of one of the papers that I had read as a graduate student, Mark Bear, and I asked him about doing a postdoc in his lab. That's where I ended up going and having a fantastic experience because I was able to combine cell biology and physiology. I had a very different experience compared to UVA-my postdoc lab at UVA was small, and Mark’s lab was large, so the atmosphere was very different.

What would you consider major challenges that you had to go through along the way to get where you are today?

One of the things about being a scientist is that you have to learn to be okay with failure. Most experiments don't work and you have to learn when to walk away.

What is your most prized accomplishment or research study that you consider to be your favorite?

Hubel and Wiesel won the Nobel Prize for demonstrating that receptive field plasticity is limited to a postnatal critical period. It is universally thought that plasticity is lost with age. For example, if you learned a second language as a baby, you can learn that second language with ease. If you've tried to learn a second or third language as an adult, you struggle with this task that's so simple for a child. My lab showed that receptive field plasticity in the visual cortex, the same plasticity that Hubel and Wiesel studied, could be reactivated in adults. If you place adult animals in the dark, when you bring them out of the dark, their visual system is rejuvenated in the real literal sense of the word. We've been working on this phenomenon for the last 13 years.

What made you decide to do the dark rearing experiment?

Putting young animals in the dark and raising them in the dark retains the visual system in an immature state. In the somatosensory system, if you block the input from a finger, the part of the brain that used to respond to that finger is reassigned to respond to other surfaces of the body. I thought that if you remove a particular input to a particular brain region, you unmask this latent plasticity. We simply removed input to the visual system by putting mice in the dark.

Can you give us any tips for graduate school?

I was doing a research rotation in the lab that would become my Ph.D. lab. My advisor was Don Murphy, whose passion for neuroscience is contagious. We sat down at the microscope together, and he showed me how to dissect the nervous system of this invertebrate that we worked on. It was the first time I'd ever seen the dissection. I came to the lab the next day and he was surprised to find me sitting at the microscope doing a dissection. And he said, “Wow, I'm really surprised you just came in and started doing your dissection!” It was actually my third one of the day. I got in early and practiced so that by the time he got in, I could do a dissection with no mistakes. I wanted to do it well and learn fast, so I just got up and I started practicing some dissections until he came in to give me some more instruction. I like that story and I tell it to my students frequently. When I walk into the lab and my students are just waiting for me, I tell them that story. Don’t wait for me-pick up a scalpel, practice. Learn with your hands.

Who are your mentors and people who influenced you as a scientist?

I already mentioned my Ph.D. advisor, Don Murphy, who just exudes enthusiasm for neuroscience and neurophysiology. He also taught me to read widely. He would get very excited about a paper published and come into the lab to tell me about it. I could not imagine how that was relevant to what we were studying.  He told me to just read widely and you learn the relevance. He also had the sort of Google culture in the lab long before Google existed. He had a refrigerator full of food and there was a darts board in the lab. The lab was the gathering place. Mark Baer whom I worked for when I was at Brown is just extraordinary. He is an extraordinary mentor, positive, supportive, and very wise. He gave us a lot of independence, support, and positive feedback. The lab had diverse expertise and a lot of times the post-docs would get these crazy ideas and go off and try a little pilot.  We would only tell Mark if it worked! This highlights how important a rich environment is. You should take into account who you’re going to be working with, and whom you’re going to be working for.

What other non-research roles did you have in the past and do you currently hold now?

About five years ago, I became the director of the Physiological Systems program. We have a long-standing, large Neuroscience program, but a group of us wanted to start a second graduate program that recruited more widely from a more diverse student body than Neuroscience did. We wanted to change the admission requirements so that we could recruit people from backgrounds like Physics or Computer Science, as well as from non-traditional backgrounds, which is how the Physiological Systems Program was born.

How has your research evolved over time?

I think one of the most interesting things about being a scientist is that you can’t predict what you’re going to be doing a couple of years down the road. You simply have to follow the data and go where the data takes you. The question that we’ve been asking since 2007 is why does dark exposure rejuvenate the visual system. We’ve stayed on the same question, but we’ve gone out and corralled a very large number of different techniques to help us understand what dark exposure is doing. The other thing I’ll say is that one of the most inspiring things for us, or for me personally, is when we’re wrong. Science is of the few professions in the world where you get excited about being wrong because when you’re wrong it means that there’s a whole new avenue, a whole new pathway, something out there that you haven't even considered, and something probably no one else has considered either. I like being wrong!

Do you have any regrets?

I don’t know if I have big regrets. There have certainly been times where I could have walked away from a project or a situation or collaboration sooner.

Have you faced any discrimination as a woman in STEM?

I did not face any discrimination in grad school, undergrad, or post-docing. I have always been in labs that were predominantly female. I have 3 sisters and no brothers, so I grew up in a very female-centric environment.

Do you think that’s key? Such female-rich environment, if we may call it that?

I believe that early environment matters a lot. I believe that children make their decisions about what is considered “gender-appropriate” career paths at very, very young ages. When I was in grad school, a good friend of mine was a kindergarten teacher. Every year, I would go to her kindergarten class and I would bring a human brain, gloves, and I’d show the brain to the kids and let them touch it and draw it. The first time I did this, one of the little boys in her class became very nervous, raised his hand, and said to his teacher, “When you told us a scientist was going to come today and talk to us about the brain, you did not tell us it was going to be a girl.” This is a kindergarten child who has already made some decisions about what is an appropriate versus an inappropriate career choice for a woman. I think it is important to show young children the diversity of options available to them. It helps prevent discriminatory behavior down the road.

Have you published any work outside of your field, or have you been involved with any?

I was involved in a couple of studies looking at the impact of exercise on hippocampal volume. We also tested the hypothesis that reintroducing estrogen to post-menopausal male and female rats would enhance plasticity, and it did.

What do you think is the challenge for us as scientists to resolve some of the crises we currently face?

One of the things that I hear students especially lament is that we seem to be going through a time in our history where people choose not to believe in science. They just categorically decide, “I’m not going to believe that.” It’s an interesting time to be a scientist when you know a large population of the world doesn’t believe science. Advocacy and approaching children when they are young is very important.

What do you do outside of the lab?

I do all kinds of things. I hike, I bike, I kayak, I ski, or go to the gym every morning, rain or shine. I do it because it’s fun and it makes me feel good, and because all that visual flow while you’re exercising, while you’re running, walking or, biking is really good for your brain. My husband and I travel quite a bit. We have a house in Alaska, and we go up to Anchorage several times a year. He goes more times than I do, but we go up every year for New Year’s Eve. I love Alaska in the winter. We go fat-tire biking on New Year's Day where it’s often -20.

What advice would you give to the students?

It’s really important to stick your neck out, take chances, knock on doors, ask questions. It’s very important, and you will probably be surprised how receptive people are. From your perspective, it may look like you’re imposing, or your idea might not be good, but from the recipient’s end, especially if it’s an academic, they’d love to listen to ideas and talk about ideas.

 This interview was conducted during the Fall Session of UVA’s Hidden Figures class in 2021. 

Class roster: Brink, Julia Elizabeth; Abraham, Carly Elizabeth; Rose, Odell Bayou; Kang, Elizabeth; Posner, Chloe Grace; Luscko, Caroline Ann; Pappagallo, Julia Dominique; Ware, Liza Elizabeth; Murphy, Ryan Martin; Faisal, Zainab; Fastow, Elizabeth; Walker, Mary-Catherine; Petz, Kaitlyn Dorothy; Terblanche, Alexandra Savenye; Nguyen, Katie; Guttilla, Gianna Marie; Hoang, Chloe Nam; Grace, Ann Brown; Smith, Charles Cornelius; Sears-Webb, Delaney Jean; Abed, Jamil; Miao, Julia Stephanie; Johnson, Catherine Anne; Kim, Evalyn; Lee, Sarah; Pietsch, Maggie Malia; Cheng, Kaitlyn Jiaying; Freud, Jordan Maria; Patel, Sonia; Silbermann, Katherine Elizabeth; Lumpkin, Justin; Lemley, Rachel Ann; Hall, Maria Elizabeth; Nugent, Elise Genevieve; Limon, Safiye; Mangan, Erva; Ali, Sophie; Muse, Morgan Noelle; Miley, Sareena Elizabeth; Bennett, Bailey Grace; Mollin, Hannah Beth; Nguyen, Daniel Van; Englander-Fuentes, Emilu Maria; Pest, Marshall Sinclair; Mahuli, Rhea Mina; Chindepalli, Jahnavi; Malyala, Meghana; Weldon, Nathaniel Andreas; Aschmies, Lindsay Elizabeth; Chakrapani, Krithi; Heintges, Bella Grace; Baker, Gabriella Christine; Bonsu, Tenneh Ina; Hall, Ann M; Rodriguez, Kaitlyn; Simmons, Emma Isabela; Davenport, Julia Barrett; Andrews, Tara; Ramirez, Alexa Hidalgo; Petrus, Sarah Anne; Singh, Aanika; Wilson, Sydney Paige; Younan, Krestina. 

TA: Kipcak, Arda. Instructor: Ribic, Adema, PhD.