Dr. Beth Buffalo
Professor Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Washington
Postdoctoral Fellow Laboratory of Neuropsychology, National Institute of Mental Health
PhD in Neurosciences University of California San Diego
If you visited Dr. Beth Buffalo’s house while she was in high school, you might have been taken aback by what you saw: sixty rats scurrying around the basement! But Beth wasn’t keeping them as pets--she was using them as an animal model for her science fair project looking at risk-taking behavior. Even after the science fair had ended, Beth decided to continue working on this project throughout high school in order to deepen her understanding of animal behavior under the guidance of her science teacher and a local professor. Whether she sensed it then or not, Beth’s first encounter with scientific experimentation would be far from her last: her clear interest and investment in this project would propel her toward a career in scientific research.
Going into college at Wellesley, though, Beth’s interests were mixed, and she was fascinated by topics in both the sciences and the humanities. Her interest in logical arguments and in deep philosophical questions led her to declare a major in philosophy, and she satisfied her scientific interest by working in labs on the side and over the summer when she was home in Little Rock, Arkansas. One particularly influential research experience was working with Dr. Howard Eichenbaum, her first neuroscience professor, while at Wellesley. Beth’s work with Dr. Eichenbaum was seminal in introducing her to studying learning and memory from a neuroscience research-based perspective.
Despite having extensive experience working in a laboratory environment, as her undergraduate career came to a close, Beth decided that she wanted to obtain her PhD in philosophy. She was specifically interested in Dr. Pat Churchland’s work at the University of California, San Diego, who studied the relationship between the mind and brain. After joining the Philosophy PhD program at UCSD with Dr. Churchland as her thesis advisor, Beth continued pursuing her interest in the philosophy of neuroscience--with a focus on learning and memory--from an empirical perspective. To tackle these complex, multifaceted questions, Beth’s graduate work began taking on a stronger scientific component and she started taking classes through the Neurosciences department. With Dr. Churchland’s encouragement to be an “experimental philosopher”, Beth also started doing neuroscience research with Drs. Larry Squire and Stewart Zola studying the effects of lesions in the medial temporal lobe on memory in monkeys and humans. When she found that she wanted to spend more and more of her time in the lab, she decided to formally transition into the Neurosciences PhD program.
After graduating, Beth wanted to continue working full-time in a neuroscience lab as a post-doc and joined Dr. Bob Desimone’s lab at the NIH. She wanted to get a deeper look at neural mechanisms underlying memory by conducting electrophysiological recordings in two prominent medial temporal lobe structures: the entorhinal and perirhinal cortices. When she joined Dr. Desimone’s lab, he had shifted focus from memory to attention, so she adjusted her research slightly and recorded from visual cortical areas while primates performed attention tasks. But when she went on to start her own lab at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Emory University, she knew she wanted to return to her passion of studying learning and memory.
Starting out at Emory, Beth used the electrophysiological recording techniques she had learned as a post-doc and applied them to studying medial temporal lobe circuitry involved in memory formation in nonhuman primates. She was also fascinated by the disconnect in our understanding of hippocampal circuitry between rodents and primates: for instance, could spatial signals discovered in rodents, like grid cells, be found in primates as well? To study the neural signatures of memory, Beth’s lab was tracking monkeys’ eye movements as they viewed a visual stimulus to determine whether or not they remembered it. At first, she thought of the eye movements themselves as an experimental confound, but then she and her graduate student wondered whether they might be able to treat the monkey's eye movements as signals of spatial exploration. By analyzing eye movements like one might analyze a rodent's movement in an open field, they were able to identify grid cells in the primate entorhinal cortex for the first time!
Today, Beth’s lab, now at the University of Washington, is still tracking monkeys’ eye movements and using electrophysiology to uncover the neural signatures of space, time, and memory. A more recent development has been training monkeys to play video games, involving the use of a joystick to navigate virtual reality environments. These tasks allow experimenters to simultaneously track neural activity reflecting the monkeys’ location in the virtual environment as well as their decision-making and memory of spatial markers. Beth’s lab hereby aims to gain a more complete understanding of how new information is acquired over time and incorporated into existing neural circuitry, ultimately influencing behavior and decision-making.
After fifteen years of being a PI, Beth’s favorite place to be is still in the lab where she can see all of the data coming in and interact with her trainees and the monkeys. She values the deep relationships that develop between monkey and experimenter while working together over several years, sometimes even manifesting as dreams where the monkeys talk! Above all, Beth continues to be inspired by big, philosophical questions about the mind, and by looking inside the brain, she and her lab are gaining exciting insights into how neural circuits turn our experience of the world into long-lasting memories.
Check out Megan’s interview with Beth on October 13th, 2019 below!
