Dr. Gina Poe
Professor Department of Integrative Biology & Physiology, University of California, Los Angeles
Postdoctoral Fellow University of Arizona
PhD in Neuroscience University of California, Los Angeles
In the time between graduating college and pursuing a PhD in public health, Dr. Gina Poe needed a job. Although she had only ever taken - and promptly dropped - one neuroscience course in college, the job she happened to find was with a neuroscientist at the Sepulveda VA Medical Center in Los Angeles. The project she worked on, funded by the Air Force, aimed to develop technology for detecting loss of consciousness in pilots. This line of work inevitably got her thinking about another, more common form of slipping in and out of consciousness: sleep. While attending a sleep conference focused on bringing new graduate students into the field, Gina couldn’t believe how many critical questions remained unanswered about such a ubiquitous and fundamental experience. Still considering neuroscience a temporary job (and thus feeling as though she had nothing to win or lose), she let all of her questions spill forth without reservation. Her unabashed inquisitiveness caught the attention of the conference organizer, and he insisted that she apply to graduate school. Although Gina initially relented only with the assurance that she didn’t have to go if she got in, by the time application season rolled around, she didn’t need any more convincing. She had become utterly fascinated by the brain and the nature of sleep, and that fascination persists to this day.
Gina’s neuroscience career began at UCLA - the same place where she would eventually return as faculty. She worked with Dr. Ron Harper to study hippocampal activity during sleep as a neuroscience PhD student and then moved to the University of Arizona for her postdoc to work with Drs. Carol Barnes and Bruce McNaughton. Although her plan was to work on a project related to memory in aging, she was still fascinated by the interaction between sleep and memory and had a few project ideas up her sleeve. One particular idea came out of a lecture given by Dr. John Lisman while Gina was in graduate school in which he described some fascinating experiments about the relation between theta rhythms and different forms of long-term plasticity in the hippocampus. But when he suggested that his experimental conditions resembled conditions present during non-REM sleep, Gina knew that he was incorrect - in fact, the conditions he described more closely resembled those of REM sleep. After much internal debate (for now that she was an aspiring neuroscientist, she did have something to lose by questioning a prominent figure in the field), she tentatively raised her hand to correct him. Instead of being taken aback, Dr. Lisman graciously thanked her for her correction, talked to her after his talk about her own work, and went on to become a mentor and advocate for Gina throughout her career. In finding the courage to raise her hand during that talk, she not only gained a scientific ally but also a research idea bridging sleep and memory that, given her graduate experience and her postdoctoral lab, she was uniquely positioned to tackle.
Thus, while she worked on the memory and aging project in the Barnes lab, Gina also began collecting data for a side project to address the role of REM sleep in learning versus forgetting. Her idea was to test whether hippocampal cells fire at the peaks or the troughs of ongoing theta rhythms in REM sleep when an animal is learning. Dr. Lisman's data suggested that firing at theta peaks should induce long-term potentiation and thus memory strengthening, while firing at troughs would lead to long-term depression and memory weakening. Fascinatingly, she found that both occurred in sleep during learning, but on different timescales; hippocampal cells initially fire at theta peaks during REM sleep in an animal’s first week of learning, but after that, they begin to fire at theta troughs. These data suggested to Gina that the temporal shift might occur when memories were successfully consolidated by the hippocampus and could then be outsourced to other structures, analogous to clearing a computer’s RAM. These exciting findings and ensuing questions propelled Gina towards establishing her independent research program.
After serving as faculty at Washington State University and the University of Michigan, Gina has since returned to UCLA, where she runs her lab in the Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology and is also the Director of Diversity in Outreach and Education. Today, Gina’s lab continues to study memory and sleep in healthy as well as disordered states, such as PTSD. PTSD patients experience abnormally high levels of norepinephrine during REM sleep, and Gina hypothesizes that elevated norepinephrine signaling might be a cause of PTSD because of how it affects plasticity in the hippocampus. Her lab is trying to better understand these processes and whether drugs that block norepinephrine could be used as effective treatments for PTSD.
While Gina has had a very successful career, her journey was not without its challenges. For instance, Gina experienced explicit stereotype threat and racism in graduate school when a classmate informed her that one of the professors leading her qualifying exams didn’t think that a Black woman could be successful in the field. Determined to prove that professor wrong, she studied diligently, reading every paper on the list for the exams. But when exam day arrived, that professor’s exam question pertained to materials on the optional reading list...the only materials Gina had not read. In that moment, the weight of that professor’s bigoted views, the pressure to prove him wrong and the fear of failing to do so were overwhelming, and Gina shut down. For half an hour, Gina wrote nothing while the other student taking the exam scribbled furiously, until he advised her, “just write about what you do know”. Gina collected herself and, with newfound inspiration, put her pen to the paper and didn’t stop until her time was up. While the exam question required some information she didn’t know, the immense pressure of the situation had clouded her view of everything she did know. Gina passed her exam, and that professor even noted that while she hadn’t exactly answered the question, she clearly knew a great deal and was therefore qualified to continue to pursue her PhD.
Having achieved her own success, Gina is now involved in many efforts to support and facilitate the success of more underrepresented minority students in the field of neuroscience. In addition to directing outreach and education programs at UCLA, Gina co-directs the Society for Neuroscience’s Neuroscience Scholars Program (NSP), which provides financial and mentoring support for minority students pursuing careers in neuroscience. She also organizes and teaches the SPINES course at Woods Hole every summer to provide technical and professional development training for students underrepresented in the sciences. Being outspoken with questions and ideas has served her well in her scientific career, and now she is using her voice to lift up others’ careers as well. Ultimately, through both her science and her advocacy, Gina has already left - and will continue to leave - a lasting impact on the field of neuroscience.
Find out more about the exciting research being conducted in Gina’s lab here.
Listen to Megan’s full interview with Gina on November 11th, 2019 below or on most podcast streaming apps!
