Dr. Jess Cardin
Associate Professor Department of Neuroscience, Yale University School of Medicine
Postdoctoral Fellow Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of Pennsylvania
PhD in Neuroscience University of Pennsylvania
Why isn’t the human brain the size of a truck? This is the fundamental question that drives the research of Dr. Jess Cardin, Associate Professor at Yale University. She seeks to understand how neurons in the brain - in particular, the cerebral cortex - are able to flexibly adapt to different behavioral states and contexts. If we had neurons that were uniquely specialized for each scenario we encountered, our brains couldn’t possibly fit inside of our human-sized skulls - and so Jess and her lab are trying to understand what cellular and circuit principles allow cortical neurons to act as “generalists” rather than “specialists”.
Jess’ interest in the brain’s flexibility can be traced back to her early fascination with learning and memory and the science fairs she participated in as a kid. In ninth grade, she harbored a dozen white mice in her parents’ laundry room for four months while she conducted an experiment on sex-based differences in how they learned to navigate through a T-maze. As an undergraduate at Cornell University, she continued to study learning, albeit in a more formal setting - in a songbird lab studying vocal learning. She enjoyed working with this model organism so much that she went on to join another songbird lab for her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania, where she learned to do extracellular electrophysiological recordings in awake, behaving animals. While she describes learning to conduct these in vivo experiments as “mindblowing”, she also became aware of some of the limitations of this sort of work and began wanting to delve deeper into the details of individual neurons’ activity. This led her to join the lab of Dr. Diego Contreras at UPenn as a postdoctoral fellow where she began recording electrophysiologically from single neurons in the cat visual cortex. From there, she went on to another postdoctoral fellowship in Dr. Christopher Moore’s lab at MIT where she further expanded her toolkit of analyses and new ways of looking at the brain.
Jess describes each of her postdoctoral mentors as having contributed significantly to her development as a scientist, albeit in different ways. From Diego, she gained a deep appreciation for the rich tradition of using electrophysiology to understand vision. His knowledge of the field and its history was vast, and he was very influential in how she thinks about and designs experiments and interprets data. Meanwhile, from Chris, Jess learned to think more about the “big picture” of the science she was doing and how to communicate her work to a broader audience - skills that became imperative as she transitioned into running her own lab. She describes him as running a sort of “finishing school” to prepare his postdocs for academic jobs. She tries to emulate many aspects of this in her own lab by being transparent about various aspects of her job that trainees don’t often get training in, like administration and managing finances.
While Jess’ various research experiences were all important steps in her path to becoming the principal investigator of her own laboratory, she acknowledges that this path is not always clearly laid out or straightforward. For instance, since she and her partner have had a “two-body problem” ever since she was an undergraduate, they have often had to make compromises and adjustments for each other in order to always live in the same place. “You don’t know how things are going to evolve for you, for your life, for your project, for the field, for neuroscience in general, for the technology that enables you to do experiments...oftentimes there are surprising developments that push you in a direction you couldn’t have anticipated,” she reflects. Thus, rather than having to follow one perfect path, she notes that focusing on working hard and intelligently in whatever situation one finds themself in can propel them forward. “There’s no one right way to do this...or the only right way to do this is to never stop moving.”
Jess describes running a lab as similar to being an entrepreneur because it requires “wearing many hats” - not only being a good bench scientist, but also a good communicator, manager, writer, and salesperson. While she still does her own experiments from time to time, one of the consequences of wearing many hats has been that she has had to learn to “let go”. For instance, she has learned to let go of wanting to get things done quickly herself and instead trust the learning process of her trainees. Moreover, as her students and postdocs have begun using techniques that she was never personally trained in, she has come to accept that she might not always be the expert. Instead, she often needs to learn from her trainees, and this has proved to be one of the most rewarding parts of running her own lab. All in all, Jess describes being a research professor as suiting her at some very deep level, and anyone who meets her will understand. As an engaging communicator, a committed mentor, and a brilliant scientist, Jess expertly juggles wearing all of these different hats.
Listen to Megan’s full interview with Jess on May 21st, 2019 below!
