Dr. Ali Ochoa Cohen
Postdoctoral Fellow New York University
PhD in Neuroscience Weill Cornell Medicine
Some of Dr. Ali Ochoa Cohen’s earliest memories involve mixing chemicals in her grandfather’s lab at the Catholic University of Peru. A chemical engineer, he instilled in Ali an early love for science. But it wasn’t until high school that Ali became interested in the brain. When she was a sophomore, Ali’s younger sister was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The tumor had likely been there since birth, but the vast brain changes occurring in adolescence had suddenly caused symptoms to emerge. Ali’s sister recovered quickly after surgery, and Ali was struck by the remarkable brain plasticity that allowed for this speedy adaptation. Her fascination with the brain was then cemented by her experience as a high school senior co-editing the Walt Whitman Journal of Psychology, a scientific journal produced by students at Ali’s high school that highlighted the science research and writing of other high schoolers across the country. Together these experiences – early exposure to a lab environment, observing the power of brain plasticity firsthand, and working as a journal editor – drove Ali to pursue a neuroscience major as an undergraduate.
Ali was drawn to Duke University because of its new neuroscience major and its strong tradition of undergraduate involvement in research. Her first foray into lab work involved studying feeding behavior using single-unit recording in behaving rats. To gain experience working at different levels of analysis, she spent the following summer focusing on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of Parkinson’s disease at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). “The NIH was where I fell in love with science,” Ali says, describing it as a “playground of amazing scientific research.” It was during that summer that she first saw science research as a potential career. Back at Duke, Ali switched to a lab studying human social cognition using fMRI and finally felt as if she had found a special niche. Her lab experiences in parallel with science outreach and tutoring kids at Duke University Hospital led her to think more about the intricacies of the developing brain. When she applied to graduate school, Ali knew that she wanted to focus on human brain development.
In discussing her career goals with scientific mentors, one name popped up in conversations over and over again: Dr. BJ Casey. BJ was then at the Sackler Institute at Weill Cornell Medical College, and that is where Ali landed as a neuroscience PhD student, joining BJ’s lab to understand how emotion and motivation shape cognitive and neural processes across adolescence. Specifically, Ali probed how emotional states affect cognitive control. She discovered that even past the age of 20, young people show differences – compared to children or adults – in cognitive control processes across both brief and prolonged emotional states (i.e., anticipation of an aversive sound or a monetary award). She also showed that this extended period of emotional sensitivity occurs in parallel with differences in engagement of prefrontal cortical circuitry. Much of Ali’s graduate work was done as part of a large collaborative effort supported by the MacArthur Foundation’s Research Network on Law and Neuroscience. This gave Ali the chance to interact with developmental neuroscientists, psychologists, and legal scholars to address how adolescents and young adults are different from adults and children in the contexts of control and culpability. Ali dove into this effort, writing a review article early in her graduate career on the intersection of law and neuroscience. These experiences gave Ali a deep appreciation for interdisciplinary research – the advantages of bringing different perspectives and expertise to the same question as well as the value of seeing how those outside your field think about your work. BJ reinforced this message, and even years later, when making a presentation or writing a grant, Ali tries to channel BJ’s ability to keep the bigger implications of the work in mind.
Her graduate work left Ali curious about how emotional and motivational states influence what people remember and how that memory shapes their future actions. She chose to join the lab of Dr. Catherine Hartley at New York University, also working closely with Dr. Lila Davachi at Columbia. During her postdoc, Ali has expanded her skill set, gaining expertise in computational modeling and more complex neuroimaging techniques as she tries to understand how motivational states affect what people remember. In addition to the opportunity to learn new technical skills, her postdoc has provided an incredibly rich experience in mentorship and leadership. Since joining the Hartley lab, Ali has been managing her own team within the larger lab, giving her a taste of what it will be like to start an independent group. As she considers her future career, Ali feels fortunate to have had three women role models in BJ, Catherine, and Lila. All three have been examples in balancing a family and a successful career, and they have also instilled in Ali the importance of advocating for herself and others.
While studying motivation in the lab, Ali has found her own motivation in the form of science outreach and has been deeply involved in outreach activities starting as an undergraduate and continuing through her postdoc. She explains that whereas progress in the lab is often incredibly slow, outreach provides an immediate sense of positive feedback, such as a child declaring that they want to be a scientist someday or the amazed faces of a parent and child as they hold a brain for the first time. One of her favorite outreach projects was co-founding the Weill Cornell Science Immersion Program, a 10-week program that pairs high school and early college students with graduate mentors for what is often their first laboratory experience. Ali loved seeing several of her friends catch the “outreach bug” after (often hesitantly) agreeing to be a mentor in the program.
As she considers starting her own lab, Ali is excited for several aspects of being a PI. She loves coming up with questions and designing experiments and wants to continue teaching and mentoring on a larger scale. She is even looking forward to doing more grant writing – she enjoys the practice of considering exactly how the ideal experiment would unfold, as well as the perfect contingency plans if the experiment were to fail. Although Ali is mostly excited for the next step in her career, she admits that she is not immune to imposter syndrome or to concerns about maintaining enough funding. But with the help of her network of encouraging family, friends, and colleagues, as well as her collection of plants (all of which have names) and occasional club-vibe workout class, Ali fights the inherent frustrations of research. With outreach as a continual reminder of the pure joy of science, Ali will undoubtedly instill that sense of joy in all those she mentors in her own lab.
Check out Catie’s full interview with Ali on December 28th, 2019 here:
