Episode 28: Sarah Kucenas, PhD

The following interview was conducted during the Spring 2024 session of Hidden Figures: Brain Science through Diversity, taught by Dr. Adema Ribic at the University of Virginia. Student interviewers were Gigi Adkhamovna Toirova, Marina M Kamal, Andrew Mason Williams, Sapphira Nguyen Thompson, Aishwarya Sivasubramanian, Goutham Baiju, Kariman M Eitta, Annabelle Grace MacTaggart, Katie Marie Manley, Gianna Lynne Latorre, Olivia G Allen, Camille Hou, Izah Zainab Qureshi and Braden W Ciszek , who also drafted Dr. Kucenas’ biography. The final editing was by Dr. Adema Ribic.

Dr. Sarah Kucenas, is a Owen R. Cheatham Professor of the Sciences in the Department of Biology at the University of Virginia, where she is also the director of the Program in Fundamental Neuroscience and co-director of the Brain Institute. She earned her PhD in Pharmacological and Physiological Sciences from Saint Louis University and completed her postdoctoral studies in developmental neurobiology at Vanderbilt University. She studies the role of glia in the development, maintenance, and regeneration of the nervous system. Her research aims to help increase observation and understanding of glial cell origins, behaviors, and interactions in an intact vertebrate.  

Could you tell us a bit about your early life and education?

I was born in St. Louis, Missouri on March 25th, 1979. My mom was a Spanish teacher and my Dad worked in business. I have a younger brother. I went to public school and was an avid swimmer. I started swimming at about age 6 and swam all the way through high school into college. I graduated from high school in 1997 and went to Valparaiso University in Valparaiso, Indiana for college. I swam there and majored in Biology and minored in Chemistry and English. I went thinking I was pre-med but quickly realized that wasn’t the right path for me. An advisor talked to me about research and a PhD. Because Valpo was a really small school, there were no real research opportunities for undergraduates. Therefore, I decided to graduate early in December 2000 so that I could get a job as a technician. I moved back home to St. Louis in December 2000 and got an entry level technician job in the lab of Dr. M. Alan Permutt studying the role of Akt1 in pancreatic beta cells. That job instilled in me a love of science and research. I didn’t love the pancreas, but I loved being able to ask questions we didn’t have answers to and the process of testing hypotheses. After working in that lab for a few months, I applied to graduate schools and started at Saint Louis University in August 2001. There I joined the lab of Dr. Mark Voigt studying the role of purinergic receptors in neural development using zebrafish as a model. Mark was an incredible mentor and he taught me everything I know today about being a creative and fearless scientist. I graduated with my PhD in late 2005 and started my post-doc with Dr. Bruce Appel at Vanderbilt University. Bruce’s lab was using zebrafish to study glial development and had just pioneered long term, in vivo, time-lapse imaging in zebrafish. I was with Bruce from November 2005 to August 2009. And in August 2009, I joined the faculty here at UVA in the Department of Biology, and the rest is history!

Could you tell more about your family?

My husband is Adam Kucenas and we married when I was a 2nd year graduate student on February 22, 2003. I have an amazing daughter, Madelyn, who was born on December 15, 2011. I have always loved dogs and have had them all of my life except when I was in college-I now have 3 BIG Mastiffs as part of my family (Harley, Titan, and Chewbacca).

What led you to pursue a career in neuroscience research? What led you to narrow your research interest into glial development?

For as long as I can remember, I have been intrigued by the brain. In fact, when I was a kid and people would ask me what I want to be when I grow up, I would always answer – pediatric neurosurgeon. Not sure where it came from, but the idea that a really squishy organ was the home of everything that made us human, just fascinated me. I’m obviously not a pediatric neurosurgeon now, but maybe close? I’m a developmental neuroscientist. Going in grad school, that was my interest and I rotated through a bunch of labs but fell in love with imaging in zebrafish. For me, I need to see the biology. The fact that you can do in vivo imaging, make transgenics, do drug screens, genetics, etc., in zebrafish, was the best fit for me. While my PhD focused on neurons mostly, glia were just really starting to hit the stage in the early 2000s. A lot of labs started turning their focus to these cells and I was immediately drawn in. We knew so little about them (still do in fact) but they are everywhere and can do so much. When I was looking for post docs, I decided to look at labs studying glia in zebrafish. There were only a few at the time, and the Appel Lab was one of them. Because they were using imaging, I was hooked. As for development – to me – we can’t ever really understand the nervous system unless we know how it’s built.  

Have there been any moments when your research wasn’t progressing the way you’d hoped it would? How did you overcome this?

ALL OF THE TIME! But my graduate mentor was incredible and he shared with me that if my data is always coming out the way that I expected, then I wasn’t asking the right questions. He said that the best questions are those that you have no idea what the biology will show you and that it isn’t our job to try to dictate that. It’s our job as scientists to listen and watch the biology and chase it. So when confusing data comes in, which it does often now, I remember what Mark told me and just chase it and let it reveal to me what it means. Hypotheses are important and you have to read the literature because to design good experiments, you need to know what others have found. But what is important to know is that a hypothesis is neither good nor bad. It is just an educated guess based on previous data and reading. So when hypotheses are wrong – that’s great. That still helps us know what direction to go and helps us designs the next set of experiments. As for science just being mean – that also happens all of the time. Protocols sometimes don’t work and sometimes it takes a lot of trouble shooting to get to where you want to be. In that case, I would always make sure I was being diligent, attentive, and careful. I also learned to ask questions when I was having trouble. Chances are someone else had worked through something similar and could help me faster than if I found the solution myself.

Is there an accomplishment in your research that you are most proud of?

It isn’t a specific discovery I’m most proud of. For me, it’s the moment when someone in the lab is talking to me about their project and experiments and I can see the moment of epiphany happen for them. It’s like a light bulb. And then they start to talk faster, start smiling, etc. They feel the science and ideas just click and I get to watch it while it’s happening. It doesn’t happen with everyone, and it happens at different stages for different people. But that is what I’m most proud of – being able to be a part of that special moment for those I get to work with.

What are some of the biggest unanswered questions in neural development and glial-glial interactions that you hope to address through your research?

We still know very little about neural development because in the most popular model organisms (mouse, etc.) and humans, it all happens in utero. This is why I think zebrafish are so powerful. We get to watch from the earliest stages how cell fate occurs, how cell migrate, how circuits are formed, etc. We can watch plasticity and redundancy occur and start to formulate an understanding of how the nervous system is assembled. In my opinion, only then can we really ask questions about memory, learning, disease, etc. 

As for glia, we are still describing what types of glia there are! And RNAsequencing and other technologies is allowing us unprecedented data to start to really unravel that question. Once we can define the cell types and mark them, we can then watch how they behave during development and ask if those mechanisms are perturbed in disease or injury.

And in case it helps, here’s a blurb that is an overview of what we do:

I have been fascinated by the cellular and molecular mechanisms that drive glial development for my entire career (23+ years). In my own lab, we have studied how glia engineer neural development via glial-glial and neural-glial interactions for nearly 15 years. Using zebrafish (Danio rerio), coupled with genetic and pharmacological perturbation, single cell manipulation, laser ablation, small molecule screening, single-cell RNA-sequencing (scRNAseq), proximity proteomics, and in vivo, time-lapse imaging, my lab has discovered novel glial populations, revealed how glia communicate in several unique contexts, and created many new tools for our studies and the broader community. In the Kucenas Lab we “chase the weird” and train the next generation(s) of diverse scientists.

What is something you would tell your younger self? What advice would you give to students considering applying to Ph.D. programs?

You’re good enough. Being a great scientist and mentor and teacher doesn’t always mean you’re the smartest in the room. What really distinguishes someone who is great is creativity, drive, and fearlessness. 

If you weren’t doing neuroscience research, what do you think you might have chosen as an alternative career path?

I have always been fascinated by ancient civilizations. So maybe an archeologist??

We noticed on your lab website that you’re an avid swimmer. Could you tell us more about this and any other hobbies you have outside of your research?

I have been swimming my whole life. At this stage, it’s more self-care than anything. It’s the only time when my brain shuts off and I almost meditate. It’s all muscle memory at this point and I really love the silence and calm that passes over me when I’m under water. I swim every day and am up at 4am to make sure I get this me time. Other hobbies include being a Mom. I have a creative, funny, brilliant, and beautiful daughter and simply watching her grow has been hands down, the most fulfilling time in my life.