Dr. Mae Guthman
Postdoctoral Fellow Princeton Neuroscience Institute
PhD in Neuroscience University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus
As a high school senior, Dr. Mae Guthman wanted to be a clinical psychologist. She had been turned off by the way in which basic sciences had been taught during her middle and high school years – classes focused on rote memorization with little room for intellectual exploration. She instead gravitated towards psychology, interested in the prospect of studying human behavior. Imprints of her family history were also evident in her career aspirations: her grandmother was a social worker, and her grandfather was a clinical psychologist. However, as Mae began her undergraduate degree at the University at Buffalo, it became evident that there was really only one part of the clinical psychology curriculum that sparked her interest: the brain circuitry underlying the behavioral output. The shape of her career was not yet clear to Mae, but one thing was certain – she wanted to learn more about the brain.
As Mae dove into research, she began to see what “science” truly was. It was far from the rote memorization of her middle and high school years. It was instead an active process of discovering new things about the world, and that process of discovery was intoxicating. Mae specifically remembers spending a summer at the University of Alabama, Birmingham studying astrocyte response in a model of traumatic brain injury. Most of that summer consisted of sitting in front of a computer counting cells in images of brain sections. But despite the mind-numbing repetitiveness of the task, Mae was enthralled. Not only was she collecting meaningful information about how the brain responds to injury, but no one else in the world had seen this particular data yet. She was the first. This magical, personal nature of scientific discovery made all of the cell counting well worth it.
Mae followed an interest in neural circuitry to graduate school at the University of Colorado, where she did a PhD under the joint mentorship of Drs. Molly Huntsman and Diego Restrepo. During her rotations, Mae became entranced with subcortical neuronal circuitry, ultimately focusing her thesis on the basolateral amygdala. She discovered a new subpopulation of fast-spiking inhibitory interneurons that mediate feed-forward inhibition, thereby gating plasticity in the amygdala. This work adds to the field’s understanding of how the brain can appropriately respond to different external situations, including those that involve threat or reward.
In addition to exploring subcortical microcircuitry, Mae also did a lot of self-exploration during her time in graduate school. Mae is a transgender woman and transitioned while working on her PhD. In reflecting on this time, she recognizes that the support of her advisor Molly was deeply important. “When I came out to [Molly], her response was telling me ‘Congratulations’,” Mae remembers. Molly understood that Mae was combating severe dysphoria and needed time and space for self-exploration, for tearing down all she had been told or had come to believe about herself and piecing together a truer self-image. Molly and Mae worked out a schedule – whenever Mae did not have to be in lab for experiments, she could do her work from home. Mae sees Molly’s acceptance and support as an invaluable part of her transition, and she advises prospective graduate students that the most important quality in an advisor is not their particular research question but rather the strength of their support for their trainees, both during and after their time in the lab.
While she enjoyed dissecting the connectivity patterns of BLA circuits, Mae still harbored a general motivation for understanding animal behavior – an interest that had driven her even back in her days of wanting to be a clinical psychologist. Mae envisions a future career that examines neuromodulation through a wide lens from synapse to behavior, so she knew that she wanted to gain experience in behavioral work during her postdoctoral fellowship. She joined the lab of Dr. Annegret Falkner at Princeton Neuroscience Institute. In the Falkner lab, Mae’s project focuses on estrogen receptor alpha (ERα), one of two main nuclear estrogen receptors and one that has been heavily implicated in social behavior. Mae wants to further understand how hormonal state changes – essentially high or low levels of estradiol – affect the network of neurons expressing ERα. From a big-picture perspective, Mae is interested in how long-term fluctuations in estradiol levels (throughout growth and development as well as experience-mediated changes) can affect the animal’s social behavior and underlying neurobiology. Further – and perhaps more personally – Mae wants to understand how exogenous modulation of hormone levels affects ERα circuits in the context of social behavior. When a trans woman decides to undergo medical transition, she is put on a mix of androgen blockers (to block testosterone signaling) and estradiol – a process commonly known as hormone replacement therapy (HRT). HRT is also often used to treat menopause symptoms in cis women. Despite its common usage, very little is understood about how HRT affects circuit neurobiology and social behavior. Mae hopes her research will help to fill this gap in knowledge.
As is evident from the project she has chosen as a postdoc, Mae’s experience as a trans woman is inextricably tied to her identity as a scientist. This is clear not only in her research but also in her desire to be visible as a trans woman within the scientific community. In doing so, she has one important goal: that others who are questioning their sex or gender might see her example and know that they can be openly trans and a successful scientist. Mae wishes she had transitioned earlier, before graduate school. However, in the absence of trans women role models in science, she had been worried that transitioning might negatively affect her career. Mae now hopes that her own personal and scientific journeys serve as an example to others that they can and should feel comfortable being their true selves in the world of science.
Listen to Dakota’s interview with Mae on September 10th, 2019 below!
