Episode 31: Jessica Connelly, PhD
The following interview was conducted in-class, during the Spring 2024 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 Samira Samadi, Bridget Elizabeth Fox, Beatrice J White, Alana Forshay, Seble Alemu, Maddie Rachel Walsh, Deetya Gupta, Miranda Popenoe Cannell, Sophie Elisabeth Levin, Bettina Ioana Wagner, Jackson Conway DeSanto, Alex Pedro Rivera-Zarate and Raleigh Lauren Moore, who also drafted Dr. Connelly’s biography. The final editing was by Dr. Adema Ribic.
Dr. Jessica Connelly is a pioneering figure in epigenetics, renowned for her research linking genetics, social behavior, and health. Her academic journey began with a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry with a concentration in Biochemistry from Richard Stockton College. After graduating, she began her research journey in Dr. John Luchessi’s lab, where she explored epigenetic aspects of dosage compensation in Drosophila melanogaster. She transitioned to her doctoral studies at Stony Brook University under Dr. Rolf Sternglanz. Dr. Connelly’s PhD thesis focused on histone code, characterizing a domain involved in regulation transcription through chromatin compaction. As a postdoctoral fellow at the Duke Center for Human Genetics, she delved into human genetics and genomics, which sparked her work on oxytocin receptor methylation. Dr. Connelly’s research has redefined our understanding of social behavior and mental health disorders.
What initially sparked your interest in the field of epigenetics?
I went into college thinking I wanted to be a biology major because I loved biology, and I started taking all these biology classes. I thought it was cool, but I was getting bored. I decided to transition, and in the public school I went to [in New Jersey], they let me actually craft my major and decide what classes I wanted to take. I took all the chemistry, all the physics. And then I took organic chemistry, and I absolutely fell in love. I transitioned into a chemistry major, and they let me decide what I wanted to do with it. In the end, I got this concentration in biochemistry which made a lot of sense. I did this work initially with my chemistry professor, Ada Cassettes. She used to walk around in our lab and she would put goggles on and she'd say everyone must wear their goggles because it is the law. I have all of these wonderful memories of her because she was an incredible professor. She would come into class with a piece of paper in her hand. She would teach an entire hour and 20 min lecture with that tiny little piece of paper, and I never will forget that, because that's always been what I wanted to be able to do with the kind of courses that I teach. I was always so impressed with the depth of her knowledge and her abilities.
When did genetics come into the picture?
I started as a biologist, then I moved into chemistry, and then I crafted my degree from there. I fell in love with organic chemistry, but then I met genetics and it was incredible. How do genes work? How do they turn on? How do they turn off? And I don't know if anybody knows this but genetics is really just chemistry, it's all really just organic chemistry. It was the perfect sort of mix of all the things that I loved. I just started from that point, and I never, ever stopped. Epigenetics is just chemical modification of DNA, and I learned about that in a Howard Hughes summer internship program that I went to at Emory University. That's where I met John Luchessi, and he taught me all about how Drosophila epigenetically regulates their DNA or their chromatin. And now what's really interesting about drosophila is, they don't have DNA methylation. DNA methylation is what I study mostly in my lab now, and there's a reason for that. But they have all these histone modifications, and they were one of the first organisms that were used to define the histone code. My time in the Luchessi lab coincided with the Olympics in Atlanta, so I always think that when you couple science with something really cool, you might have a better memory of things, or that your memory actually might be uplifted by the opportunity. I think that there was something really special about that summer, and he taught me how to love science because he was a very giving and gentle person. He had a lab full of amazing scientists, and I left that summer program thinking that I found out what I wanted to do with my life. That's how I got to epigenetics.
How did your experiences with mentors influence your research direction throughout your academic journey?
I started graduate school at Emory, and I decided that Drosophila was too limited for what I wanted to learn. I needed to work in an organism that I could move faster in-Drosophila moved really fast, but it wasn't fast enough for me. Yeast was fast, but nobody at Emory worked in it, so I ended up switching graduate programs. A lot of people would told me not to do it. I went to Stony Brook so that I could work with some of the preeminent chromatin biologists in yeast. There were two there at the time. One was at Cold Spring Harbor, and the other one was at Stony Brook. I rotated in both of their labs, and I ultimately chose Rolf's lab. He would say to me “you're not working enough.” And I would say, “Okay.” He would say, “I don't see you here on the weekends.” And I would say, “Okay.” And he actually crafted and created me and my mind. He used to quiz me on the spot-I'd walk into work and there would be a whiteboard, and he would say, “All right. I need you to tell me about the newest or the last paper you read. I would like for you to give me the summary, the synopsis, and I'd like for you to draw some of the figures on the board to show me what the data looked like.” He was challenging to work for, but I have to be honest with you, if people are not challenging you, they're not teaching you. Everybody gets scared of these kinds of things, but if you want to be great and you want to have an amazing mind, you need to be challenged, and you need to be put into situations that scare and terrify you sometimes. Everybody thinks that that feels like punishment or something. But actually he loved the ability to teach me in my mind, and that is why he did what he did. He crafted me and he is the reason that I know what I know today. So I would say, the person with the biggest impact on me was him. Even though it was really really hard to work for him, and it made me cry sometimes, it never made me feel like I wanted to give up.
What continues to motivate you?
I am really into understanding how genes work. That's what really motivates me. I work on one gene right now, and there are 30,000 or so genes in the genome. Why would you pick one gene? I'm kind of like a dog with a bone on that one. I came into a field where a lot of people weren't really paying attention to how the gene worked but they spent a lot of time talking about the gene and its product. And I thought to myself, you know what we don't really know – genes are tricky beasts– we don't really know how they work until we know how they work, and even when we know how they work, we may still not know how they work.
So what motivates me? I want to understand how genes are regulated. That sounds kind of boring, but it's true. The way that the cell works to turn genes on and off in my mind is one of the most beautiful things that someone could ever see. And we can see a lot of that now, because we have beautiful microscopy techniques. But that's really what keeps me motivated every day because I get data in my lab, and I get one step closer every day to understanding how a gene really works to impact behavior.
You had the unique opportunity to work with Dr. Sue Carter. What was the biggest lesson you learned from this experience?
I said Rolf Sternglanz had the biggest impact on my life for epigenetics, but Sue Carter has had the biggest impact on my life, not just for science, but as a woman in science. She has supported my growth. All those days when people told me I wasn't good enough or I couldn't do it, or they wouldn't let me do it, she was there. She wasn't ever more than a phone call away. When things just got too tough and I felt like I couldn't take another step, she'd call me up and give me just what I needed, which was usually a pretty firm talking-to. Sometimes she yelled at me, that just depended on what I needed. Sue has had an outsized impact on my life. She's one of the most prolific and brilliant scientists I've ever worked with. She knows everything. Her mind is like an encyclopedia. She can pull papers out from 30 or 40 years ago, and tell me the exact reference. It's really just overwhelming sometimes, but the two of us complement each other really well, because she doesn't know a lot about genes and I've taught her over time. One of the big things about a mentor is that they're not really supposed to just be the person who kind of shows you how to do things-you should actually learn how to show them how to do things, too. You need to learn how to complement each other, and you need to learn how to love what each of you knows and use it together so that you can make big discoveries, and that's what she's done for me. She's really always had a high level of faith, even when I doubted my abilities, that I know what I'm doing and that I am going to figure it out. Some of what drives me is figuring out how the oxytocin receptor works, because I want to give that to Sue. That's my gift to her for what she's done for me. One thing you have to know about me is that I work hard, but I love hard too. I have a lot of emotional passion for people and for the things that we do, and especially people who impact my life, and she's the person in science that has impacted me the most.
What are some of your interests or activities outside of your scientific work that inspire you or provide a creative outlet? How do these interests impact your approach to research and teaching?
This is the hardest question for me because I have restricted interests, and all I do is think about genes. I drive around town, and I see genes in license plates, and I turn the radio off, and I do math in my head. My husband makes fun of me all the time about that. I couldn't have been happier than when my sixth grader got her first report card, and it said, ‘loves fractions.’ My husband looked at me and said, “this is not me.”
Outside of my scientific work, my interests are primarily centered around my family, particularly my two children whom I affectionately refer to as the best genetics experiment ever. They bring immense joy and fulfillment to my life. I was raised in an environment where you weren’t really allowed to cry, so I cry a lot now; where you weren't allowed to really say much, so I say a lot now and it's really loud. {When I was growing up] you also weren't really supposed to do things that were outside of typical things, and that's just not me. I'm not typical and I'm okay with that, so my kids are like that. They're totally not typical, and I love that about them.
However, raising these kids was one of the hardest things that I've ever had to do. The first one has Asperger's, ADHD, and dyslexia. He's got all the awesome stuff. It made him a really special learner, and it created a world for me that was really hard, but I say he was sent to me so that I could learn. This kid has taught me more than I will ever be able to teach him, and he's incredible. My outside stuff is really focused on him and my daughter. If I have any extra spare moment, that's what I do. I like being outside. I like to hike. I don't like to hike too far. I don't like it when it's hard, either. I exercise a lot. That's something that really helps me with my brain because my brain can get really overwhelmed with things sometimes. It can get sad about things. It can get really happy about things. When I find those people in my world that really, really piss me off, it's much better to pick up a punching bag. It really, really helps. There's a lot of things that you kinda have to hone your abilities in if your mind traverses the world differently from most people, so I would say the biggest thing outside of my kids is exercise, and I exercise really hard, as hard as I possibly can.
My daughter is a crafter. I call her ‘Crafty Kathy.’ I've no idea where she came from. All she does is craft nonstop, and she has brought crafting into my world. I'm not a very good artist. I don't draw well, but this kid is amazing-she creates in 3 dimensions, which is awesome and I get to experience the world through her eyes.
Did having your two kids, and going through motherhood, impact the trajectory of your research or increase your passion for the oxytocin field at all?
I don't like me-search. I hate me-search, but somehow I ended up doing it, and I'm not searching for me. It just kind of was interesting. Oxytocin is not interesting to me because of motherhood or parents. Well, parenting is interesting to me, it's more interesting to me because I kind of stumbled upon the gene and I just want to figure out how it works. It just happens that it fits into my life perfectly. Parenting is hard. People parent usually the way at first that they've learned to parent from their parents. And I think that's really interesting. It's textbook epigenetics, which is one of the reasons that I wanted to study it.
I don't know that I would tell you that some of the drive hasn't been because I've tried to create myself into a better parent. There is something about seeing how parenting can change the brain, how it changes, how genes are expressed, how it changes the way the brain is set up from an early time point, and how the environment can influence everything that is interesting. It's much more interesting than just drawing genes on a board. You'll get a much more interested crowd when you're talking to them if you pick something interesting to work on like that too, so for a lot of reasons, I entered the oxytocin field. Not for me-search, but it somehow fits into my life.
What has been the greatest challenge in your life?
Having kids was the hardest thing I've ever done. I had really bad postpartum depression with my first. I almost lost my career because of it. I could hardly get myself out of bed to drag myself into the lab to do the thing I was the most passionate about every day, and it was early on in my career. I had my child in 2009 and I started my lab in 2008. I don't want to blame things on my parents, but it's just the way I was raised – this idea that I couldn't have kids until I could actually pay for myself in science. I started paying for myself when I got my first job, and I said, “Okay, I'm gonna have a kid, because it's time.” I was 32. I just got whacked with something that I never thought in a million years would happen to me. Some of it is genes, but a lot of it is environmental and it's about not taking care of yourself. It's about trying to do things by yourself and not asking for help. I learned a tremendous amount from having that experience. I almost lost my job, which was the scariest thing in the entire universe. I learned many years afterwards that we're sort of regulating stress by asking for help. Especially as a woman, we're told “you have to be strong, you can't cry, can't ask for help.” In our mother’s generation, they had this mantra that women could do everything. Yes, we can, but not without help. Nobody can do everything without help. It took me a long time to learn that, and I think that I had such serious depression after my first child because I only took 6 weeks off, if that.
The day after I got out of the hospital with my son, I had two scientists over to my house to meet my son, and I ended up talking about science the whole day. I didn't really want to. But that's just what happened. I never really took a break. And it was really important that I do that. I learned from my first child how to do it the right way. I had my second child with natural birth. I had no interventions, and that was the most incredible thing I've ever done in my life. It is the most amazing thing you can do, and all we do is talk about the pain, but the pain goes away really fast. What you're doing is bringing life into the world, and it's through oxytocin.
Another way that has impacted my world is that I learned actually how to navigate my world better through better social support– that's part of asking for help– through less stress, through interacting with my children and my spouse instead of just being in the lab all the time.
You have produced many successful publications, and have worked with many people to do so. In your experience, what is the most important factor in making research collaboration successful?
I am the card-carrying member of research collaboration. I learned how to do that at my postdoc. There was this amazing scientist who led the team at Duke, Pascal Goldschmidt Claremont. He was the Dean of the medical school at the University of Miami. He moved there while I was a postdoc. I got to spend a couple of years with him. He taught me the power of collaboration, and he showed me how to do it just from watching him. I was a part of the group that he worked with, and there were moments where he would come into a room full of twenty people and say, “We're not working together. We're gonna stop everything we're doing right now. And we're gonna figure this out.” He taught me that we can make bigger strides with collaboration. He taught me how to not be selfish. He taught me that if you give something to somebody else scientifically, you're not always going to get the credit, but in the end you're going to see the product, and that's actually all the credit you need.
He was a very brilliant man, but he was also very giving in the way that he taught, and he mentored and I learned how to do that from him, from watching him. I took it with me. It was the number one thing that motivated me throughout my scientific career. From the moment I started my lab and I preach it every day to my students. You'll hear me say it at lab meetings all of the time, you'll hear me tell them to not be selfish. You'll hear me tell them to help each other. You'll hear me tell them that it takes more than one person to do things. And if that's one thing that I can impact in their lives walking out of my lab as scientists, I want them to know that they're only as good as their ability to collaborate.
Is there a professional accomplishment you are most proud of? Or a professional accomplishment that you were most curious to explore?
If I had a legacy that I wanted to leave in science, it'd have nothing to do with the science that I published or the things that I figured out. I would like to place as many powerful, strong, awesome women in science as I possibly can, and I want to spend my entire life supporting them. That's what I want to do.
I want to make sure those people get where they need to be, and that they become the leaders, not just the leaders in their fields, but the leaders of teams of scientists. They say you can give one act of kindness to somebody and they spread it, like a domino effect. I feel like the more people-kind, generous, really bright, fantastically smart scientists-I can put up at the top and get them where they need to go, the more the science will change. It needs to change because we need to be better to each other. We need to know that there is crying in science. Failures are just as big as successes. There is absolutely no way for you to understand success without lots and lots of failure, right?
I want these people that I train to go places. I want them to go where they want to go, and I want them to impact the world. My biggest accomplishments are the really amazing students that I put out into this world that I know are going to make really big impacts, not just on science, but on other people's lives and raising scientists.
For people new to the concept of epigenetics, are these methylated areas immediately impactful, or are they triggered by the environment or compound factors later in life? In other words, are they inborn?
Methylation is just carbon and 3 hydrogens, that's all it is. That group is put down on a cytosine residue, which is one of the 4 nucleotide bases in DNA. It's a signal to the cell to change the way that it's going to interact with the gene. That's all it is. It's not very complicated. We make it much more complicated than it is.
That signal can be put down because there's a genetic modification, but it also can be put down through signaling, cell signaling, and through signals from the environment (cellular environment, too).
The coolest thing about cells is that they really just act and respond depending on where they are and what they're supposed to do. Epigenetically, they get set up early on, and they get certain marks that are set down to make them the kind of cell they are supposed to be. That's one route that epigenetic modifications or DNA methylation can impact the cell. There are some cool cells in our body that can move from a committed to a non-committed state, and that's totally epigenetic-smooth muscle cells in our body do that. Everything that's outside in our environment can impact us but I don't think it moves us in a big, big way. I think we're kind of set up epigenetically early on in a way that probably is genetic, then we can actually move that epigenetic state back and forth, and that helps us fine tune ourselves to the environment.
We learned that studying the maternal brain is very underfunded and not widely explored by other labs as a result. Is it because of your experience with childbirth, and the legacy that you want to leave of helping other women, that makes you particularly motivated to continue exploring the maternal brain. What advancements are you hoping to see there?
First of all, women's health is understudied because women are second class citizens. That doesn't have to be the way that things are and things are changing, which is good.
Sometimes in science you get to study something from a simple perspective, and you know the idea of studying a male is a much easier, simpler system than a female, because they don't carry offspring, etc., and so I will give some credit to the scientific world in saying that a lot of the science has been done on male organisms because it was just simpler and easier. And when they started looking at females, things didn't fit the same way and it got really complicated.
However, there's also a bias. Because, some people think “women are supposed to give birth to children, and that's what their jobs are. We don't need to really study that.” I had a really terrifying birth experience with my first child. I almost died. I consented while I was giving birth to remove my uterus because it wouldn't stop spasming because they gave me so much oxytocin. I worked on oxytocin at that time. I should have known better, right?
Actually, because it was so crazy, and I lived through it, I thought, “Wow, I should probably figure this out.” I decided that I just don't want women to have to go through things like that. I think there's better ways for us to use the synthetic oxytocin which is called the pitocin. I think we need more individualized treatment, individualized medicine, and I think I know how to do that. I study the maternal brain and also the uterus, how it interacts with the environment during pregnancy, and the way that oxytocin and external oxytocin changes it because I want to better understand how we can save women's lives, and I want to save women's lives by not filling them with pitocin.
Another reason is because I work with this amazing scientist called Allison Perkeybille-she's the Prairie vole goddess. She was trained by Karen Bales and Sue Carter. Alison is the most incredible scientist because she knows how to use this organism, but she's also come to learn how to do genetics and genomics with me and she has an incredible mind. She really wanted to work on the maternal brain, so that's really the reason that I work on the maternal brain-because Allison wanted to do it, and I thought it was an important thing for us to do.
We found an article by Meghan Puglia where you oversaw her research on how sex hormones shape the brain by chemically tagging genes. The research explains how oxytocin and vasopressin play a role in sex differences and are tied to autism. One quote from this article says, “Disorders occur when the gene from one parent is naturally silenced, and the gene from the other parent is mutated, stamping out expression of that gene altogether” (Puglia, et. al., 2015). Does this also factor into social expression?
Yeah, I think it does and this is a part of the next 25 years of my career-figuring out how this works. The reason I work on the oxytocin receptor is because when I was a postdoc, I created a microarray. This was back in the early 2000s when the human genome was sequenced. We didn't yet have these micro arrays available to everybody, and you actually had to make your own. I did 300,000 PCRs one summer so that I could actually create a library of the human genome and I created my own human microarray.
The first thing I wanted to do with it was to actually look for something called copy number variance in the human brain. Copy number variants are these tiny little deletions or insertions of genomic DNA, and you can actually use this array that I created in order to find them.
I had this hypothesis, and we know that this is true, that copy number variance may, in fact, drive some of what [autism] spectrum disorder comes from. What that means and how we understand that I'm not sure we have not looked. Every autistic brain is different. There's not a single person with autism that's the same. I will say that outright.
I had samples from 2 kids from the same family, and one of them had autism and the other one didn't. They were both boys. I had their parents DNA, and I had their DNA, and I found a copy number variant in the oxytocin receptor. That copy number variant occurred in the kid with autism, but it also occurred in the kid that didn't have autism. That didn't make a lot of sense, because if it was actually causative, then you would assume right that the one kid didn't have autism, so it can't be the thing that's driving it. Well, I'm an epigeneticist, so I thought to myself, ‘Well, Jeez, what happens if the second copy of that gene is actually highly methylated in one, but not in the other?’ So I used the micro arrays to not just find the copy number variant, but to also look at the methylation.
I found that the kid that had autism had hyper methylation of the oxytocin receptor. That's actually how I started studying the oxytocin receptor and its methylation status. I have always thought that one of the ways that we can phenocopy a deletion is by hyper methylating the gene. My entire career launched from this one tiny little experiment, where I was the first to show in the human brain that the oxytocin receptor could be hypermethylated, and then it was hypermethylated more in autistic brains.
I should have been the first author on it, but the senior author, Margaret Pericak Vance insisted that she be the senior author on it, so my former boss, Simon Gregory, was first. That's just how things work.
What challenges or limitations have you faced in your research of the epigenetic factors impacting the oxytocin receptor gene?
I started my lab and one of the things that I wanted to be able to show was that you could use DNA methylation at specific genes in the genome that are variably methylated. Different people have different levels of methylation. I wanted to show that [methylation] could be a marker of individual variability so we could use that to better explain differences in social behavior. What I wanted to be able to do with science was to actually find markers that would help better understand the variability we see in the [autism] spectrum. I turned out OXTR was a good one for that, and then you gotta have an accessible tissue to measure it from. I spent the first 10 years of my career banging home the fact that I could actually use blood as a biomarker of the brain. I did all the experiments so people would stop arguing with me. I needed to show it in humans and I needed to show that in an animal model that this would work similarly, and then I needed to pick the right animal model, which is the prairie role.
When I first proposed that you could use the oxytocin receptor, the DNA methylation status of it as a marker of individual variability, I sent in three grants. One to the NIH, one to the NSF, and two internally here. My husband, Jamie Morris, who is the chair of psychology, is a neuroimager. He overheard me talking to a reporter one day about my lab’s oxytocin receptor findings in autism we thought it would be cool to image the brain under social conditions. His specialty is social perception and how the brain perceives the social world. He knows exactly how to capture individual variability and social perception, and we wanted to see if we could couple that with DNA methylation levels from the blood of all those people. We wrote these three grants, and every single one of them laughed at us. But every single one of those grants said, ‘You're crazy. Get out of town. We're not giving you money for this. It'll never work, and it's for all of these reasons.’ It was great because it gave me a list of things I had to do so that people would stop laughing. Finally, somebody funded it, and we published our first paper, and it worked!
How did you overcome all the negative reviews?
When you're a young investigator, everybody tells you that you don't know what you're talking about, and the thing that they forget is that the young investigators are the ones who do know what they're talking about because they have the most bandwidth. They have the most brilliant minds. When you're under 30, you have the most tremendous and amazing ideas and those are the people we want to be able to fund. That was the point where my career actually completely changed. I moved from the medical school to the Department of Psychology and my entire career changed. I'm really glad that they laughed at me. I wish I had saved the reviews, because I could probably hang them up on my wall like some people do.
Where do you see the field of epigenetics heading in the next decade, especially in relation to complex diseases and conditions? How do you envision the future of research in epigenetics influencing clinical practices or therapeutic strategies?
I don't think we're gonna be able to use epigenetics in the next decade. In order to use markers in medicine, you have to have really big samples and lots of people, and you have to show that those things are impactful in a way that you can actually predict from them. I think we need larger studies and we need lots and lots of minds working on that.
One small thing we might be able to do, and again, I would have to do a big clinical trial or a big trial with hundreds of thousands of women, is that we might be able to use the markers that we've established in OXTR to better understand how much pitocin or synthetic oxytocin to give women when they give birth. However, I don't think the doctors are gonna follow the strategy, because it's easier just to give the women the bolus of oxytocin right? Because, it saves women's lives. It gets babies out. That's what they're supposed to be doing. I know it's disappointing, but we'll get there. 23andMe is starting to show us how we can use our genetics. So there’s a lot of companies popping up around this kind of stuff for epigenetics.
We are wondering what you are particularly hoping to explore next in research? Is there a topic you have not delved into yet that excites you, or recent advancements that give you hope for the field?
Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about epigenetic age. A lot of people are using this right now as a biomarker. I want to actually know how epigenetic age works. The actual measurement of it is not difficult at all, but how it works is a whole another question, meaning, what are those epigenetic marks, the group of them doing? How are they changing? How is the body actually changing with it, and how is this an actual marker for our time of death? I think that's really, really interesting, because it actually suggests, because it's epigenetic we might be able to push it backwards, too.
Now that you run your own lab, how does it feel to have the roles reversed where you are now the one mentoring others?
When I first walked into my lab, my technician had written Connelly Lab or Connelly over everything. I didn't think my name should be here. It was a big defining moment. Wow! This is my lab? Now I know I deserve to be on the little microcentrifuge tube rack. The short of the story is when you kind of reach the point where you go from being the person who works in the lab to the person who runs the lab, it's scary in a lot of different ways. For me, I never doubted that I could run a lab, build a lab, have a lab, all of that, but the fact that it actually happened was the thing that was really surprising. My favorite science quote is from Louis Pasteur-chance favors the prepared mind. When good things happen you'll be ready to swoop it up and take action and get to the right places. I think a lot of career, success and science has to do with being at the right place at the right time, and having a big and smart enough mind to figure out how things work, and then being able to tell people about it. Don't sit there and not tell anybody. I tell my students all the time, you need to flex.
What is your favorite part about teaching epigenetics to undergraduate students?
I love it when the light bulb comes on. It's the most extraordinary experience. There's nothing like when you realize somebody has figured it out and you help them get there. I don't need to fill your minds with information. I don't need you to memorize facts. I want you to walk out of my classroom, knowing more about you and a little bit about how science works. And then, most importantly, everybody can do it. It's kind of like Ratatouille, where they say everybody can cook right. I really believe everybody can learn about genetics and epigenetics. It is not unaccessible. It's only the way it's taught that makes it that way.
We know that prairie voles are known for their ability to co-parent, and that a lot of their behaviors overlap with human behaviors, and that's why they were chosen instead of another animal. Are there any differences between voles and humans that create difficulties in generalizing or, or doing this sort of research?
Although voles parent together, we can measure the amount of care that they're giving. It's not the same as raising a human baby. The things that we identify will point us in a direction for what could be happening in a human, but you have to test that in the human in the context of the complex behaviors of humans.
It's very difficult, when a scientist says they are using an animal as a model-that doesn't mean they're really modeling all of the things. They're really getting information so that they can not start with a million things in humans. It’s data reduction that will allow you to just pick the things that are the most giving the biggest contribution.
In your research in the Connelly Lab, you mention that the conserved MT2 region changes methylation state in the brain and blood with differences in parenting styles. How does the methylation state change between a secure parenting style and a more avoidant parenting style?
I can't tell you that because we don't have these different attachments in voles. We could only make a guess by saying voles that are raised in a lower care environment have a tendency to be more anxious, they don't pair bond as well, so the quality of their relationship seems to be impacted.. Those are the kinds of things that would be insecure attachment, but I can't tell you that a vole was insecurely attached. We've only done the very beginnings of [nitty gritty details] by showing that an animal that's raised in a low care environment versus an animal that's raised in a high care environment has an epigenetic difference.
How have you seen the study of epigenetics evolve since you began working in the field?
In the last 30 years, epigenetics has moved into being used in ways that we never even thought of: to study individual variability to better understand the way each person's gene could be differentially regulated through the environment, for example. However, the field is still in my mind's eye in its infancy. We have not done nearly enough work to be able to prove things I do are truly epigenetic phenomena.
What advice do you have for students hoping to pursue a career in research?
My best advice to all students really is think big. It's actually on my door. It says, “what would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail”? That's my advice to them. I do not believe that you should ever be limited in what you want to do. It's all up to you and you can do it. You should study the science, you should allow the science to guide you, but you also know that science is not set in stone. Follow your mind. Use your mind. Follow the way that you think things work. Make sure when you're doing it, they're testable. Not every way that you think about things is going to happen the way you think it works.
In a recent article published looking at cortisol levels between children and dogs, you found that child cortisol reductions were greatest in the condition involving interaction with an unfamiliar dog rather than with their pet dog. Do you think your results would have been different if you had used an animal other than a dog, or would any domestic animal elicit similar cortisol levels?
That's EvanMcLean's paper. He's out at University of Arizona and he's an expert in animal human behavior. There's plenty of data out there that suggests that dogs, when they see their owners come home, their oxytocin levels change. I met Evan through my mentor, Sue Carter, and we began a collaborative project so that he could actually test our hypotheses about methylation now in the context of human and dog interactions.
