Dr. Tina Gremel
Dr. Christina “Tina” Gremel, like many who find their way into neuroscience, was originally slated to go to medical school. However, she found herself dreading it as the start date inched closer. She’d found instead that she loved being a “lab rat”, and so, she decided to pursue a career in research. Years after that fateful decision, she is now an Assistant Professor in Psychology at the University of California, San Diego where her lab studies decision-making circuits in the brain and how decisions become actions.
Dr. Tina Gremel
Assistant Professor Department of Psychology, University of California San Diego
Postdoctoral Fellow National Institutes of Health
PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience Oregon Health and Science University
Tina has a rich history of studying behavior - from behavioral economics of drug self-administration as an undergrad with Marilyn Carroll at the University of Minnesota, to Pavlovian learning processes as a graduate student with Chris Cunningham at OHSU, to self-initiated learning processes and their underlying neural circuits with Rui Costa and David Lovinger at the NIH. In her own lab at UCSD, she is trying to better understand the goal-directed, self-initiated processes that underlie decision-making and how those processes are influenced by different factors such as general context or substances of abuse like alcohol. Remarkably, she says that they are finding they can model decision-making in mice extremely well; sometimes the mice are very good at it while other times they are quite poor, much like humans. By following their decisions across time and with well-controlled manipulations, the lab can start to understand some of the factors that are influencing good versus poor decisions of mice at different times.
In her path toward neuroscience, Tina’s own decisions were sometimes made on the fly. She recalls a comical experience of signing up to take the GRE with a single day’s notice and rushing to make it in time from working in lab. And when it came to actually applying to graduate school, she had to overnight her application to get it in just before the deadline. But while some of these decisions were quickly made, Tina is a clear thinker whose decisions at countless steps in her career path helped get her to where she is now.
One such choice that was particularly formative for Tina’s career was working with Chris Cunningham at OHSU. She recalls learning a tremendous amount from him, not only in meticulous experimental design but also in how to lead a laboratory. She describes him as an exceptional scientist and someone of immense integrity who did not walk away from tough situations. Her time in the Cunningham lab greatly influenced how she models her own lab in terms of data integrity, reproducibility, and intra-lab communication and teamwork.
Tina describes herself as being “easily excitable”, particularly when it comes to new data and enticing scientific findings. She remembers when, as a postdoc at the NIH, she first saw evidence that her mice were successfully performing the behavioral task she had designed and literally ran down the hall frantically looking for someone with whom to share the good news (and this wasn’t an uncommon occurrence). This excitability has likely served her well in science, as the “highs” she got from interesting results helped propel her through the tough times when things didn’t work. As the PI of her own lab, Tina’s enthusiastic nature hasn’t changed. She gets just as excited when her trainees come to her with new data as she did when she was collecting her own as a postdoc. While this excitement is completely genuine, she thinks it may have the added benefit of helping her trainees to develop a more critical eye in order to offset some of her unbridled enthusiasm.
All in all, Tina’s positive, “can-do” attitude has served her extremely well in her career. For all her excitability and enthusiasm, even Tina recalls feeling very cynical by the time she finished graduate school in the face of a growing financial crisis, an apparent dearth of academic jobs, and surrounded by other, similarly jaded graduate students. Nevertheless, she stuck with it because even through her cynicism, she loved her time in graduate school and the research she was doing. “If you really love it, you just do it!” she says. She takes a similar approach to her life outside of lab as well, maintaining an active lifestyle full of running, cycling and gardening and as a mother to two young kids. While she acknowledges that having kids inevitably limits the amount of time that can be spent physically in the lab, she makes it work. “It’s a struggle but come on, this is life...there’s a lot of joy to be had in different portions of your life so why not grab ‘em”. This sort of enthusiasm for life and for science is infectious. It permeates the way that Tina talks about her work, and anyone around her can’t help but feel equally excited about what lies ahead for her and her lab.
Listen to Megan’s full interview with Tina on March 7th, 2019 below!
