Dr. Adrienne Fairhall
Professor Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Washington
Postdoctoral Research Fellow NEC Research Institute and Princeton University
PhD in Physics Weizmann Institute of Science
Dr. Adrienne Fairhall became captivated with the explanatory power of physics at an early age. As a ninth grader, she attended physics lectures at her local university in Australia and trained to become an “explainer” for the Questacon Science Center. For the rest of high school, she worked at the science center explaining how things like air pressure and modes of vibration work to the center’s visitors, ultimately even giving full-blown public science lectures as part of Questacon’s “Science Circus”. Today, as a preeminent theoretical neuroscientist at the University of Washington, Adrienne is still an “explainer”, though in a different capacity; she and her lab seek to use underlying physics principles to understand and explain neural interactions in the brain.
Having excelled in math throughout high school and gained additional physics training from her time with the science center, Adrienne was enthusiastic to begin university as a double-major in physics and honors math. Her introduction to neuroscience didn’t come until later, when she was a physics PhD student at the Weizmann Institute in Israel working on turbulence with Dr. Itamar Procaccia. She recalls it being a particularly exciting time at the Weizmann Institute; its new brain science institute was attracting many students transitioning from physics into neuroscience as well as many world-renowned faculty. Adrienne began attending some neuroscience lectures and was captivated by the style of discussion. These lectures were frequented by a diverse assortment of psychologists, computer scientists, neurobiologists, mathematicians and physicists, all with different perspectives but a common goal of understanding the brain. The excitement and energy in this burgeoning field at the Weizmann was contagious, and Adrienne caught the bug. She decided to pursue postdoctoral research in the field of theoretical neuroscience.
Through her postdoc and into starting her own lab at the University of Washington, Adrienne studied adaptive neural coding: how changes to an animal’s environment lead to changes in how the environment is represented in its neural activity. With Drs. Bill Bialek at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton and then Michael Berry at Princeton University, Adrienne studied adaptive coding in the fly visual system and found that the precise “remapping” of firing rates closely reflected changes in the variance of the flies’ environment. She continued to explore these fundamental principles of adaptive coding in other systems as she began her new lab and found that these principles were largely shared across different sensory systems. These findings suggested a fundamental principle of a “neural code” for how neurons represent the world around us - an exciting discovery for theoreticians and experimentalists alike.
Today, Adrienne’s lab focuses more broadly on understanding the nature of the neural code. She collaborates with a number of different experimental labs to address a wide variety of neurobiological questions - questions ranging from how muscles work in Hydra, to the role of birdsong variability, to how monkeys “learn to learn”. Often, such collaborations emerge when Adrienne sees a colleague’s talk and finds their data particularly “inspiring” - data that raise fundamental questions about the neural code into which physics might provide some insight.
On top of being a successful scientist, Adrienne is also a mom and an outspoken advocate that those roles are not mutually exclusive. As a postdoc, Adrienne knew she wanted to have a family, but looking around her, she saw very few examples of colleagues, male or female, who also had kids. After having her first baby, she noticed that many young women were keen to talk to her, seeking advice on how to balance having a family and building their careers. She realized that there was a real need for and lack of open conversations about work-family balance. This motivated her to publish her now widely circulated blog post, aptly titled “How does she do it?”, which features many female neuroscientists who have successfully balanced their careers with families and their words of advice. Importantly, her post includes not only descriptions, but also pictures of happy scientist moms with their kids. “What I really wanted with the blog more than anything else was to replace those images that we have very often of women as the “hero” in the lab [...] with the other side, which I heard so many young women in particular being anxious about...if you do that, if you ARE the hero in lab, what’s the effect that’s having on your kids? Are they miserable? […] What I wanted to show was that, NO! - you could be in the lab and come home and your baby still loves you!” Although she notes that some tradeoffs may be necessary - like relinquishing some parental responsibilities to another caregiver - she wants other aspiring neuroscientists to know that a fulfilling family life, if desired, is completely attainable.
Work-family balance is not the only hurdle facing young academics about which Adrienne is intentionally transparent. She is no stranger to feelings of anxiety and imposter syndrome; for instance, as a new undergraduate in the first day of her honors math class, her professor’s descriptions of the course prerequisites made her so anxious about her own preparation that she dropped down to a lower-level class. A few years later, after having returned to the higher-level math track (and scrambled to catch up with the classes she’d dropped), she learned that the other students in that same class were no more prepared than she was. This was a moment of realization for Adrienne that those feelings of anxiety could be unfounded and counterproductive. While she still regularly feels anxious, she has learned to not let those feelings hold her back. Furthermore, she tries to encourage students who are overly critical of themselves, often disproportionately female, to not hold themselves back either.
Adrienne leads by example in countless ways - as an exceptional scientist, as a working mom, and also as a prominent female academic in a particularly male-dominated field. One of her efforts as the co-director of the Computational Neuroscience Center’s research and educational program at UW is to encourage more women to pursue computational neuroscience. While there could be many reasons why women are underrepresented, she hopes that demonstrating the exciting applications of math to neuroscience questions will encourage more women to enter and stay in the field. “It’s not that women don’t like math - they love math! - but then they end up not necessarily wanting to be mathematicians but to apply math to things that they find exciting. And this field is the most exciting one you can imagine!!” With enthusiastic role models like Adrienne at the helm, there’s plenty of reason to be optimistic for the future of women in computational neuroscience.
Listen to Megan’s interview with Adrienne on December 10th, 2019 below!
