Dr. Stacey Dutton
Assistant Professor Department of Biology, Agnes Scott College
FIRST Postdoctoral Fellow Emory University School of Medicine
PhD in Neuroscience Emory University
This profile was written from Dr. Stacey Dutton’s interview with Dr. Brielle Ferguson of Black In Neuro as part of #BlackWomenInNeuro day during #BlackInNeuroWeek (July 27-Aug 2 2020). You can check out the original interview on the Black In Neuro website, as well as here on our site (linked at the bottom of this page!)
Dr. Stacey Dutton was on the verge of going to graduate school for immunology when neuroscience ruthlessly forced its way into her life. While studying for the GRE as a senior at the HBCU University of Maryland Eastern Shore, her younger brother experienced a massive ischemic stroke that rendered him hemi-paraplegic. Not only did this incident upend her brother’s life, but it precipitated a dramatic shift in Stacey’s career trajectory as well. At that point, she had been spending her summers conducting immunology research at the NIH and was fully committed to pursuing graduate studies in that field; she had never even taken a neuroscience course. But once her curiosity was sparked, she could not be deterred from studying the brain - the organ whose dysfunction had so suddenly transformed her brother’s life. Despite encountering tremendous obstacles along the way, especially as a Black woman in a predominantly white- and male-dominated field, Stacey has emerged as a tremendously accomplished and inspiring Black woman in neuroscience.
While shifting to neuroscience at the tail-end of college presented some challenges, even more challenging was the transition from her HBCU to the “white world of academia” as she entered graduate school in neuroscience at Emory University. Stacey describes starting graduate school as an incredibly difficult and lonely time. Not only was it tough to go from being at the top of her class to being among a whole cohort of individuals who had all been top of their classes, but the ensuing imposter syndrome was compounded by being one of only a handful of Black graduate students across multiple departments. She recalls only about five Black students, herself included, in their 150-person graduate-level biochemistry course. Moreover, throughout that entire course in which countless professors cycled in to give lectures, not a single one of those professors was Black. That feeling of being an outsider was exacerbated when she received a poor grade - by far the worst of her life - on her first test, putting her on academic probation for that first semester. To top it all off, she was living in a new state where she didn’t have any roots or family, or even any faculty mentors who she felt comfortable reaching out to for help. Nevertheless, Stacey managed to seek out the help she needed to move forward, harness her inner strength and make it through. She not only survived graduate school but was also incredibly successful along the way, conducting exciting research on the role of voltage-gated sodium channels in epilepsy syndromes and winning multiple competitive fellowships. She reflects on this period as being the most character-building experience of her life, during which she developed her resilience and ability to forge through challenges that has helped her to confront other difficult periods in the years since.
As Stacey concluded her PhD and went on to a postdoc also at Emory, she still wasn’t certain what she wanted to do with her life. While she enjoyed the science, she felt that more attention was given to the work she was producing rather than her as an individual and her own development as a scientist. Meanwhile, many of her most rewarding and enjoyable experiences in graduate school had been in mentoring other students - in supporting their scientific development. She felt that she wanted to focus her career on helping cultivate the next generation of scientists. As a FIRST Fellow at Emory, she gained considerable training in teaching and decided to pursue a professorship at a liberal arts college where she could run a research program while being much more extensively involved in teaching and mentorship.
Stacey is now an Assistant Professor of Biology at Agnes Scott College, a small liberal arts women’s college outside of Atlanta. Her lab’s research focuses on ion channels, especially voltage-gated sodium channels, and has recently expanded to investigate these ion channels in arguably one of the least-studied organs in all of human biology: the clitoris. Stacey became inspired to pursue this line of research while she was teaching a course on the Biology of Womanhood and realized how little she knew about this sexual organ. Initially she was greatly distressed - “How could I be a female biologist?!” - but decided to put that exasperation into action. Much like when she first decided to switch gears and move into the field of neuroscience in the first place, her passion and curiosity once again led her to take a great leap and incorporate the clitoris into her research program. Since then, this line of work has taken off in ways she never expected, like in getting her involved in developing teaching strategies to educate people about sex and the clitoris. She was even featured in the documentary Dilemma of Desire and organized a multidisciplinary event called “Clitical Thinking” at her institute, which featured a series of science, arts and humanities talks and a huge statue of the full clitoris by the artist Sophia Wallace.
While her research topic has brought some unexpected twists to her career, Stacey has been unwavering in her commitment to mentoring. She explains, “My passion behind being a scientist and a teacher is wanting to cultivate great scientists”. So while she sometimes has to say no to serving on additional committees or other extra responsibilities, she won’t ever say no to mentoring students. Particularly as one of the few Black faculty in STEM fields at her institution, she finds that many young Black women seek her out as a mentor, and she feels both a responsibility to help them and a personal investment in their success. She recalls how hard it was to find Black scientific mentors throughout her own career, especially Black female mentors, and how long it took to feel a real sense of a community on her scientific journey.
Stacey has found that community at Agnes Scott College. For the first time in her career, she can truly be herself without engaging in emotionally-taxing code-switching. She feels that her value to the community is seen and appreciated, and it has enriched her as a scientist in a way that she never quite found before. “Coming here was that ticket to happiness for me,” she reflects. As a professor and as a visible Black woman in the broader Black In Neuro community, she is now in a prime position to support the next generation of Black women in neuroscience so that they might not feel quite as alone as she once did. “Graduate school as a Black person is a lot of surviving,” she reflects, “...but Black In Neuro is the next step of surviving - we’re thriving now, and we’re doing it independent of what everybody thinks.”
Learn more about the #BlackInNeuro platform and mission on their website.
Check out Stacey’s original interview with Dr. Brielle Ferguson of Black In Neuro during #BlackInNeuroWeek below!
