Dr. Julie Siegenthaler
Associate Professor Department of Pediatrics, University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus
Postdoctoral Fellow University of California, San Francisco
PhD in Neuroscience and Physiology SUNY Upstate Medical University
Dr. Julie Siegenthaler vividly remembers sitting in a neuroscience class at Mount Holyoke as the professor drew a neuromuscular junction on the board. She marveled at the detailed structure of the junction, the site at which a neural signal is translated into muscle movement. It was at that moment that Julie became truly hooked on neuroscience. Starting college as a history major, Julie had shifted first to a psychology major and then to a neuroscience major as she found herself drawn to the basic cellular and molecular biology of the brain. Enthralled with the topics taught in the neuroscience curriculum, she felt that she had finally discovered her niche. Importantly, as Mount Holyoke is a women’s college, Julie found herself immersed in a deep history of women excelling in science, so it seemed normal to her that she might do the same. And that’s exactly what she did.
From Mount Holyoke, Julie went on to do a PhD in Neuroscience and Physiology at SUNY Upstate Medical University, where she became engrossed in developmental neurobiology and what drives neural stem cell differentiation and migration. Towards the end of her PhD, Dr. Sam Pleasure visited her poster at a Society for Neuroscience conference, and they continued their conversation over lunch. Julie distinctly remembers Sam whipping out his laptop in the middle of a Chinese restaurant in DC to show her an interesting new developmental phenotype he had observed—a mouse with an elongated neocortex. She was fascinated. Julie eventually accepted a postdoctoral position in Sam’s lab at the University of California, San Francisco.
One of Julie’s favorite “discovery moments” came during her postdoc. She was genotyping mouse pups that had been exposed to retinoic acid (a metabolite of vitamin A) during development. Standing at the gel box, she thought there must be something wrong—the gel bands clearly denoted that these mice had the mutation that causes an elongated neocortex, but the mice looked totally normal. It turned out that it wasn’t a mistake or a fluke—she had discovered that retinoic acid overrides this particular mutation, restoring normal cortical development. Julie is still working on the roles of retinoic acid in development in her own lab at the University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus, studying the interactions between the brain, the meninges, and the brain vasculature.
While Julie is particularly passionate about the meninges and the cell types that reside there, she is happy for her students to generate their own questions, even if that means straying from the main focus of the lab. “I think that the most successful mentors are ones that don’t box their students in,” Julie says. Instead, the best mentors trust their trainees and give them the freedom to test their own ideas. A second aspect of mentorship that Julie believes to be important is maintaining a fast turnaround time for anything her trainees send her, such as manuscript or grant drafts. “It lets your students and postdocs know how important their work is to you,” she explains. Ultimately, Julie finds mentorship incredibly rewarding—as satisfying as scientific discovery itself. Helping her trainees succeed, she is able to watch her impact reach beyond her own work and lab.
Julie still spends a lot of hands-on time in the lab, training students and postdocs in the art of dissecting meninges off the brain or doing microscopy. However, her scientific guidance is not reserved only for her formal trainees: each day she sends a microscopy photo to her 12-year-old son (at his request)! He even came up with the name for the new cell type she recently characterized, “ceiling cells.” When not in the lab, Julie’s attention is focused on her family, and it’s evident that she is passing down the pure thrill she finds in scientific discovery; Julie muses that her son knows all about neurogenesis and loves the blood-brain barrier. Her enthusiasm for her work is undoubtedly helping to inspire the next generation of scientists.
From that moment in college taking in the beauty of the neuromuscular junction, Julie has been driven by insuppressible curiosity. She says there are two types of people in the world of science: those who can coverslip a slide and wait until the next day to look at it, and those who need to peek at it immediately. Julie is the type of person who needs to peek. However, it might be that these categories are not set in stone. I wouldn’t be surprised if Julie’s unbridled enthusiasm for science has throughout the years helped to shift colleagues and trainees from the type that goes home after coverslipping to the type that just has to flip on the microscope, if only for a moment.
Listen to Catie’s full interview with Julie on April 6th, 2019 below!
