Dr. Heather Snell
Postdoctoral Fellow Albert Einstein College of Medicine
PhD in Neuroscience University of North Texas Health Science Center
It was far from love at first sight when Dr. Heather Snell was introduced to neuroscience. In fact, when she took her first neuroscience course as a senior in college, she downright hated it. Heather felt as if the class only involved memorizing and regurgitating information. Following this experience, she was dead set on doing cancer research in graduate school at the University of North Texas Health Science Center. However, during her first graduate school rotation in a cancer-focused lab, she found the question was always the same: does this drug prevent cancer proliferation? This simple yes-or-no question didn’t satisfy Heather’s curiosity. For her second rotation, she found herself teasing apart the complex puzzle of neuropharmacological interactions in Dr. Eric Gonzales’s lab. The rest was history. “Don’t write things off initially,” Heather explains. “You can always fall in love with it later… and [now] I absolutely love the brain.” Heather is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Dr. Kamran Khodakhah’s lab at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and her early apathy towards neuroscience is a thing of the past.
Heather’s interest in neuroscience fully blossomed during her PhD while studying the interactions of amiloride – a common drug prescribed to diabetics for hypertension — and a signal receptor called GABA-A ρ1 (ρ1). This receptor is highly expressed in the retina, contrary to other similar receptors that are only expressed in the brain. Heather wondered if ρ1’s localization hinted at its role in diabetic retinopathy, a leading cause of blindness. To answer these questions, Heather purified the ρ1 receptor and performed electrophysiological experiments to record the channel’s activity while exposing it to different levels of amiloride. Ultimately, her work showed that her hypothesis had been correct: amiloride increases the severity of diabetic retinopathy by increasing the activity of ρ1 receptors. This finding uncovered that the drug commonly prescribed to diabetics could be contributing to the degeneration of a patient's vision.
In her second year of graduate school, Heather attended the Summer Program in Neuroscience, Excellence and Success (SPINES) hosted at the Marine Biological Lab (MBL). The course, geared towards underrepresented minorities in neuroscience, taught Heather “how to survive in neuroscience.” The overflowing scientific stimulation and open environment at MBL led Heather to audit a neurobiology course being taught at the same time as SPINES. Inadvertently, this led Heather to meet her future postdoctoral mentor, Dr. Kamran Khodakhah, who was an instructor for the course. Heather saw his passion for science and mentoring style over the summer and told herself “I don’t care what he’s studying, I don’t care where he’s at, I want to do a postdoc in his lab.”
Heather and Karmran stayed in touch after meeting that summer, having reunions at conferences in the years following. After her PhD, Heather moved to her current position as a postdoctoral fellow in Karmran’s lab at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. This transition led her to a whole new subfield within neuroscience, far from her neuropharmacology roots. Heather now studies how changes in Purkinje cells, a cell type in the cerebellum, contribute to motor disorders. She is specifically investigating episodic ataxia type II. Patients with this condition are uncoordinated and clumsy, and when triggered by stress their bodies lock up entirely. These attacks of immobility can last for hours — or even days. A genetic mutation in a calcium channel in Purkinje cells causes this disorder. Heather uses a mouse model with the same genetic mutation to tease out what is happening during stress-induced attacks. By combining her electrophysiology expertise from her PhD and behavioral tests for stress-induced attacks and motor impairment, Heather continues to tease apart the mechanisms of episodic ataxia type II.
Heather has deftly taken on new challenges throughout her career, both inside and outside of the lab. Just as her project was taking shape in her second year of her postdoc, Heather was diagnosed with uterine fibroids. After months of sickness, pain, and three surgeries, Heather struggled with feeling like she was falling behind in her research. During that time, she learned the importance of listening to one’s body and that science can wait. “My PI made me realize that the science will be there. It’s important, but you only have one body,” Heather says. With the support from her PI, and care of labmates delivering food to her apartment, Heather came out stronger than ever with a new perspective. “It’s great to have high expectations for yourself,” Heather explains. “But if you are constantly not meeting those expectations, you should definitely reel them in. You’re only being mean to yourself and you have to show yourself some compassion.”
In the future, Heather hopes to open her own lab where she can continue studying calcium channels in Purkinje cells and their roles in other types of disorders. Mutations in these channels do not only affect movement, but also cause migraines and autism-like disorders. Heather hopes to bring together all the techniques she’s learned over the years to answer how a mutation in a single gene causes so many different disorders. “My dream lab has a group that’s studying migraine, a group that’s studying seizures, a group that’s studying motor disorders, and a group that’s studying autism spectrum disorder — all focused on this one channel.” Heather’s ambitious goals are within reach as she has already created a mouse line expressing the human calcium channel mutation, and is working on a conditional mouse line where she can control when and where the mutation occurs. Equipped with these tools and seemingly endless directions of interest, it’s only a matter of time until Heather’s late-found love for neuroscience guides her to the next discovery.
Listen to Nancy’s interview with Heather on September 9th, 2020 below or wherever you get your podcasts!
