Dr. Brenda Bloodgood
Associate Professor Department of Biology, University of California San Diego
Postdoctoral Fellow Harvard Medical School
PhD in Neurobiology Harvard Medical School
Imagine you are walking through the forest and you hear birds singing. Suddenly, the sound stops. The birds soon start singing again, but you notice the song is different. What does the new song signify––a mating call or a warning signal? How could you test this? When the graduate student teaching behavioral neuroscience in Columbia University’s Science Honors Program for high school students asked this question, a young student named Brenda Bloodgood tentatively raised her hand. She proposed putting one of the birds in a large cage next to a big-screen TV, showing VHS tapes of predators or birds of the opposite sex, and recording the bird’s song response. The graduate student was clearly impressed and told Brenda that it was essentially what the researchers had done. In that moment, Brenda decided that she wanted to be a neuroscientist. Not only did she find the concepts of the class cool, but here was evidence that she could do what a neuroscientist did.
Today Dr. Brenda Bloodgood is an associate professor of Neurobiology at the University of California, San Diego (USCD). She remarks how unique it is not only that she had such a lightbulb moment as a high schooler, but also that the light never went out—she never stopped wanting to be a neuroscientist. Admittedly, the path was not always clear-cut. As a part-time community college student in California, whenever Brenda mentioned her career aspirations, she got the sense that others thought it was more of a pipe dream than an attainable goal. After transferring to UCSD to complete her undergraduate degree, Brenda landed a job washing and autoclaving glassware in Dr. Ed Callaway’s lab at the Salk Institute. It wasn’t long before she was interacting with Ed’s trainees, asking a lot of questions and staying in lab late into the night to watch experiments. Her impression as a high school student hadn’t been wrong—neuroscience was as cool as she had imagined, and it was something people did for a living! Brenda has done it for a living ever since.
Today, in her own lab, Brenda focuses on trying to understand how brain circuitry changes in response to experience. For instance, how might a particular event during childhood influence someone as an adult? The lab approaches these questions by homing in on the interface between nature and nurture, studying how experience can alter the expression of genes that regulate synaptic function. This broad question is an amalgamation of perspectives gained from her work as a trainee––on synaptic biophysical properties as a graduate student with Dr. Bernardo Sabatini, and on transcription factors as a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Mike Greenberg, both at Harvard Medical School.
Not only were Brenda’s graduate and postdoctoral work synergistic in the context of scientific perspectives, but they also gave her two different examples of mentorship from which to draw. From Bernardo she learned patience and a fearlessness for approaching difficult scientific questions. From Mike she learned how to mentor trainees in a way that allowed them to find their own footing, as well as how to help trainees secure good positions after leaving the lab. The central theme underlying Brenda’s approach to mentorship in her own lab is to recognize that each of her trainees is an individual with a life outside of the lab––a life that inevitably introduces both problems and joys. Brenda tries to mentor each trainee based on the type of guidance that individual needs at that particular time.
While Brenda enjoys the variety of things she gets to do as a professor, including mentoring and teaching, she does sometimes miss working at the bench herself. She describes the surge of adrenaline she felt when she first saw something that no one had seen before. She was a few years into her graduate work when the lab acquired a photo-activatable green fluorescent protein (GFP) that could be expressed in neurons and would turn green when stimulated with light. It felt like playing a video game. Brenda had been playing with the new technology, light-activating dendritic spines on neurons for hours. Each time, the GFP would appear and then diffuse out of the spine. Suddenly, she saw something surprising. In one spine, the GFP didn’t immediately diffuse away as it had in the hundreds of other spines before it. In the following weeks, Brenda tried to figure out what caused the GFP diffusion to differ among spines, but she struck out again and again. Late on a Saturday night, she tried one last experimental condition. She knew immediately that she had her answer: the ability for GFP to remain in the spine was indeed activity-dependent! Brenda did a happy dance. This project became her first publication.
As she reminisces about her time in graduate school and as a postdoc, Brenda remarks that she would love to advise her younger self not to worry so much about things not working—a failed experiment, a rejected fellowship application. While she admits that some sense of worry can be good if it propels you to work hard, the accompanying anxiety is not productive. There will inevitably be both successes and failures, and they may even change your trajectory, but that’s ok––”what really matters is that you enjoy what you’re doing, do the best you can, and treat others around you well. That is what is left in your wake.” After this poignant thought, Brenda laughs. “I’d tell myself not to worry, and I would probably not take my own advice!” Worrier or not, Brenda is leaving both excellent science and devoted mentorship in her wake. Undoubtedly she has had––and will continue to have––students experiencing their own epiphany moments during her class, realizing that they, too, could one day be neuroscientists.
Listen to Catie’s full interview with Brenda on June 6th, 2019 below!
