Dr. Susanne Ahmari
Associate Professor Department of Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh
Psychiatry Resident and Postdoctoral Fellow, Columbia University
MD & PhD in Cellular & Molecular Physiology Stanford University
Before becoming a neuroscientist and psychiatrist studying and treating obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), Dr. Susanne Ahmari had a very different idea of how she would advance human health. She had a romantic vision - likely inspired by pop culture and films such as Medicine Man- of going off into the rainforest and identifying novel botanicals that could be used to cure cancer. But when she started college with a research fellowship at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, there wasn’t a lab that fit that niche. She needed a back-up plan, and well...the brain seemed kind of cool? Thus began a journey that, while not quite what Susanne initially envisioned, would nonetheless culminate in a career of helping people - her original and unwavering goal - through combined research and clinical practice.
The lab she ultimately settled into was that of Dr. Bill Greenough, a leading expert in how age and experience impacts brain plasticity. The Greenough lab was exceptionally welcoming to motivated undergraduates such as Susanne, and she developed a deep passion for research and neuroscience. She was intent on pursuing a PhD, but at the same time, she longed for more immediate feedback of seeing her work’s positive impact on people. This led her to decide to pursue an MD and PhD, despite a lack of role models who had taken that path and well-intentioned discouragement from family and friends who were concerned about such a lengthy training timeline. Susanne took a leap of faith - the first of many in her career - and entered the physician-scientist training program at Stanford University.
Having largely abandoned the Medicine Man career path, Susanne had a new goal of pursuing neuroscience research and neurology practice. At first, things were going according to plan; she did her PhD with Dr. Stephen Smith at Stanford, using sophisticated microscopy techniques in hippocampal cell cultures to examine how synaptic proteins are co-transported to the sites of new synapses. But then, when she returned to medical school and started her neurology rotation, she identified a small kink in her carefully constructed career plan: she didn’t like neurology. Thankfully, it wasn’t too long before she discovered a new love: psychiatry. While she felt that psychiatry, not neurology, was the field of medicine she wanted to pursue, she was once again faced with a dearth of role models - psychiatry was an unconventional path for physician-scientists to take at the time - and some discouragement from her medical school mentors. Yet again, she decided to take a leap of faith. But as soon as she interviewed for a research-oriented psychiatry residency at Columbia University, she knew she’d made the right choice. “Listen to other people”, she advises, “...but you also have to strongly value your own belief about what is the best for you.”
At Columbia, Susanne started working in the lab of Dr. René Hen and collaborated with clinical researcher Dr. Blair Simpson on a newly funded project to study OCD by bridging basic science research in mice and clinical research in human patients. Given her research experience and her clinical interests, Susanne was the perfect person to build that bridge. As she began conducting various clinical tests in OCD patients and exploring the effects of different levels of serotonin receptors in mouse models, she came to realize that, when it came to doing research, she preferred the mechanistic studies that she could only do in animal models. As she began the transition to leading her own independent research program, Susanne wanted to understand the mechanisms underlying aberrant neural activity patterns found in OCD patients. Susanne proposed using optogenetics - what was then a novel, not widely used technique - to simulate these abnormal activity patterns in mice. Excited by the potential of this new technique, she obtained independent grant funding to purchase her own optogenetics equipment. After seeking out training from the Deisseroth group at Stanford and bringing optogenetics to her lab at Columbia, Susanne made the exciting discovery that chronic, but not short-term, optogenetic hyperstimulation of a pathway from the orbitofrontal cortex to the striatum led to increased grooming in mice - a behavior with relevance to repetitive behaviors in human OCD patients.
Today, Susanne’s lab at the University of Pittsburgh uses a variety of optogenetic, transgenic, imaging, electrophysiology, molecular and genetic techniques to study the neural causes of compulsive behaviors in mice. In line with her clinical interest in OCD, her lab is also working with human postmortem tissue to look for molecular substrates of OCD. Susanne continues to bridge basic science research with clinical work - for instance, she collaborates with clinical researchers to develop tasks that can be analogously applied to both animal models of OCD and human patients. She also still sees patients, which allows her clinical practice and research to continue to feed back onto each other. In fact, some of her lab’s current areas of research have emerged directly from her clinical practice. For example, Susanne is especially interested in understanding the circuits underlying negative reinforcement processes - how a reward can actually take the form of a removal of something negative, like a threat, rather than the receipt of something positive. This was directly inspired by her first OCD patient during her residency at Columbia; when Susanne asked whether the patient’s compulsions felt good in any way, she answered yes, but only because they made her anxiety go away. This conversation has stuck with Susanne over the years and directly inspired an active area of investigation in her lab. Moreover, she finds that sharing details of her research can itself be therapeutic for her patients, who are often seeking consolation and explanation for why they struggle to control their obsessions and compulsions. When one patient asked for a “neuroscience mantra” they could use, Susanne offered, “I don’t have to listen to my striatum!” In all of these ways and more, Susanne has found the integration of her research and clinical work to be every bit as rewarding as she’d hoped it would be. Her leaps of faith have paid off.
Of course, these leaps weren’t free of challenges. Building that bridge between human clinical and animal basic research during her postdoc, while rewarding and ultimately very successful, was often tremendously difficult. No one else around her had done that before, and so she had to be almost entirely independent. Starting her own lab, which required transitioning from working on her own to managing people and bearing the responsibility for their work and wellbeing, presented its own set of challenges, especially as it coincided with a health scare and having a child. Nevertheless, maintaining her faith that things would work out in the end has proved to be a powerful driving force throughout her career; she is doing exciting science that is helping people, just as she always dreamed. And although this doesn’t involve traipsing through the rainforest as she had once imagined, it is every bit as fulfilling.
Find out more about the exciting research being conducted in Susanne’s lab here.
Listen to Megan’s full interview with Susanne on February 19th, 2020 below!
