Dr. Bianca Jones Marlin
Postdoctoral Fellow The Zuckerman Institute, Columbia University
PhD in Neuroscience New York University School of Medicine
As a freshman college student, Dr. Bianca Jones Marlin saw a flyer that would ultimately alter the trajectory of her life. At the time, though, she wasn’t looking for a change – she was just looking for a job. The flyer was an advertisement for the NIH’s Initiative for Maximizing Student Development, a competitive program that partially covered college tuition and paid students an hourly wage for work in a research laboratory. Bianca was accepted into the program and joined a fungal genetics lab, which she enjoyed more than she had expected – this form of “biology in real time” was far more exciting than the typical biology lab class. Yet Bianca still viewed lab work as a job, helping to financially support her as she followed her dreams of becoming a teacher.
There was no real ah-ha moment when Bianca realized she wanted a career in research, but she slowly found herself increasingly more invested in and invigorated by her time in the lab. Two summer research experiences, one at Vanderbilt and the second at MIT, opened her eyes to research in a new context – large labs where she was given independence and real responsibility. At the end of Bianca’s summer at MIT, a dean from NYU stopped by her award-winning poster, handed her his business card, and encouraged her to apply to NYU for graduate school. But Bianca was still planning to teach. A dual major in biology and adolescent education, she was driven by a desire to help her students acquire knowledge at a faster rate, and she had always envisioned doing this from the front of the classroom. However, as Bianca was finishing up her student teaching, she had a nagging feeling that she was not yet done learning. She thought she might eventually return to teaching, but first she wanted to more fully understand the biological mechanisms of learning and plasticity. Thoughts of that business card resurfaced. She took the plunge and applied to neuroscience graduate programs, landing at NYU where she joined the lab of Dr. Rob Froemke to study the neurobiology of parental behavior.
Rob was new to NYU. So new, in fact, that he was still unpacking boxes when Bianca started her rotation, and she did her first behavioral experiments with Tupperware that she bought with her own money at K-Mart. The experiments were all-consuming, requiring her to check on the mice every three hours for three days at a time. Bianca slept on a couch in the lab, going home in the few hours between each timepoint to eat, shower, etc. It may have been an unglamorous schedule, but it was an incredibly rewarding one. Bianca found that oxytocin was sufficient to drive maternal behavior in virgin female mice who would normally ignore young pups, results she published in Nature.
While her graduate work was wildly successful, graduate school was not without its frustrations. Bianca remembers her first months trying to perform whole-cell recordings in vivo – a difficult, niche technique that her advisor specialized in. She was trying to understand whether neurons in the brains of virgin mice and mice who had given birth would respond differently to the sound of pups crying. For three months straight, Bianca worked six days a week trying to patch cells, each day disappointed with the noisy data she had procured. Eventually, feeling completely discouraged, Bianca asked a friend from down the hall for advice. He looked at her data. “Zoom in,” he said. He pointed to a blip of neural activity on the screen. “You’re recording.” A chill traveled down Bianca’s spine. She dug through months worth of data that she had thought were useless because her in vivo recordings looked nothing like the clean slice recordings normally depicted in textbooks. The blip was always there. She had been recording the whole time! Not only that, but the recordings held discernable information – the answer to the scientific question she had been asking.
After a productive PhD, Bianca was offered the opportunity to start her own lab – an unusual offer reserved for the most independent and exceptional graduate students. While this was an enticing arrangement, it was contingent upon Bianca continuing the oxytocin work, and she wanted the intellectual freedom to explore whatever questions piqued her interest. “I wasn’t done with the learning,” she says. “No one is ever going to take the techniques and the thought processes and the passion I had with that study. That’s always going to be with me. So why not add onto it?” Bianca therefore decided to do a traditional postdoctoral fellowship.
She joined the lab of Dr. Richard Axel at Columbia University to study the phenomenon of transgenerational epigenetics – how the experience of a parent can change the behavior of multiple generations of offspring. Given that females are born with all of their eggs already formed, in contrast to males whose sperm turnover is about a month, it would seem reasonable to study transgenerational effects in females. However, Bianca has an instinct for asking questions that are outside the box, an instinct that has set her apart as a scientist and will undoubtedly continue to do so. Instead of studying females, Bianca chose to investigate whether sperm cells can carry genetic memories. How might trauma experienced by a father affect his male and female offspring?
While she was diving into the molecular genetics of mouse families in the lab, Bianca chose to start a family of her own. Having a baby opened her eyes to several roadblocks for new parents in academia. Some logistical issues surprised her because the solutions were so obvious and easy to implement. For instance, how could academic buildings still not be optimized to support families after so many decades of young faculty working within their walls? When her daughter was born, there was no lactation room available for her to use, and only the women’s bathroom had changing tables. Bianca spoke out. In less than a year, her institution created three beautiful lactation rooms that Bianca helped design and set up, and the men’s bathrooms now have changing tables that her husband can use to change the baby while Bianca is working. “When I see a woman walk in [the lactation room], there’s a beautiful piece of pride,” Bianca says. She is happy that finding an empty room to pump milk is “one less step [women] have to take before they can get back to their data.” These changes are a reminder of the power of advocacy and of the progress that can occur when people speak up for their needs.
A sense of the importance of advocacy is a common thread throughout Bianca’s career. From her time studying adolescent education as an undergraduate and throughout her graduate and postdoctoral work, she has been motivated by a passion for augmenting learning processes in children and young adults. As a student teacher, she recognized the vast impact that socioeconomic stress or traumatic experiences could have on a child’s ability to learn and focus in the classroom. This realization ultimately influenced her scientific interests as well, leading her to investigate the molecular bases of parental behavior and the heritability of trauma. While her original career plan of being a middle school teacher may have shifted, this passion for understanding and optimizing learning processes clearly has not waned. As Bianca sets out to start her own lab, she envisions her work emphasizing the power of adult cortical plasticity – the brain’s ability to overcome the consequences of negative life experiences. Even though she does basic science research, she is still driven by a desire to effect societal change. And if her excellent track record in science is any indication of the future, Bianca’s work will likely reach far beyond the lab bench.
Listen to Nancy’s interview with Bianca on October 20th, 2019 below!
