Dr. Alison Barth
Professor Department of Biological Sciences and Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Carnegie Mellon University
Postdoctoral Fellow Stanford University School of Medicine
PhD in Neurobiology University of California, Berkeley
A few years ago, prominent neuroscientist Dr. Alison Barth took an unusual step in her career; she began learning to play the violin. While watching her kids play the violin for many years was one source of inspiration for her own musical undertaking, another was more scientific in nature. Her lab at Carnegie Mellon University studies how experience - particularly learning - modifies the brain, and so for Alison, playing the violin is as much an experiment as it is a hobby. She marvels at how enormously difficult it is, and yet, with daily practice, she can hear herself gradually improving. How is she able to do this? It’s an age-old question in neuroscience whose answer has remained elusive, but Alison is determined to get to the bottom of it.
While Alison’s fascination with learning is the cornerstone of her lab’s research, it is just one of countless curiosities that have propelled her into a scientific career. In fact, she recalls being interested in extra-sensory perception (ESP) as early as age 7 and devising an experiment to test her “mind-reading” ability on her friends. While that childhood fascination foreshadowed a future interest in neuroscience, questions related to evolution and anthropology were at the forefront of her mind at the time she applied to graduate schools. Even though she ultimately decided to focus on biology for her graduate work at the University of California - Berkeley, she still wasn’t sure what she wanted to study. Rather than setting her sights on a particular line of research, she followed her curiosities. This led her to join an immunology lab that had recently discovered genetic recombination in the brain. Alison was fascinated by that phenomenon, but was not specifically interested in the brain - at least not yet. As she delved further into her work, however, she became increasingly captivated by the brain. She ultimately decided to switch labs to focus entirely on neuroscience, joining the lab of a new faculty member, Dr. John Ngai, to study olfactory receptor expression in zebrafish. While transitioning labs and being part of a brand new lab presented a number of challenges, she “dug in” and went on to identify novel developmental principles of how different odorant receptors become expressed in olfactory neurons.
As Alison was finishing her PhD, she found herself particularly drawn to the field of synaptic plasticity and questions pertaining to learning. Wanting to move into that area of research and expand her technical expertise beyond molecular neuroscience, she chose to study synaptic physiology for her postdoc in the lab of Dr. Robert Malenka at Stanford. While she found that the immediate feedback of electrophysiology experiments was extremely gratifying and better suited to her personality than the molecular biology experiments of her graduate years, her postdoc experience still came with some new hurdles. She became acutely aware of the unfair expectations often imposed upon women - to be neither too soft-spoken nor too outspoken, for instance - that create a restrictive mold of the “right way” to be a female neuroscientist into which she simply did not fit.
Having a baby during her postdoc presented new challenges as well. Alison had a difficult pregnancy in which she felt constantly and miserably sick, and even when the sickness dissipated after the birth of her child, exhaustion and financial instability took its place. During this stressful time, Alison became exceptionally intentional with how she spent her time, and this drove her to be bolder and less afraid of failing. Moreover, the financial pressure to support her family made her especially motivated to find her next job. She considered many different kinds of jobs - industry, science policy, teaching high school, even the military, as well as research faculty. While she wasn’t wholly confident in her ability to take the latter path, she found she was most successful in those job applications and that the prospect of starting her own lab ultimately appealed to her the most. Still, she reflects, “I absolutely had the feeling that I was going to do it for a little while and see how it worked out - I wasn’t going to quit, I’d wait for people to fire me - but I was really ready to do something bold because I didn’t mind if it didn’t work!”
But it did work - Alison is now the Maxwell H. and Gloria C. Connan Professor in the Life Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, where she’s been leading her own lab for nearly 20 years. The first project in her nascent lab was characterizing a new transgenic mouse she had developed at the end of her postdoc - the “fosGFP” mouse, which was the first tool of its kind for labeling (with green fluorescent protein, GFP) and visualizing neurons undergoing plasticity in a living animal. It was just on her penultimate day at Stanford that she first verified the presence of GFP expression in her mice, immediately filing a provisional patent before picking up and moving to Pittsburgh. As she began characterizing these mice in greater depth in her own lab, it became clear that they were going to be an extraordinarily useful tool for experiments on experience-dependent plasticity and learning that she wanted to do. With this discovery, Alison’s lab hit the ground running, making significant discoveries about the roles of different glutamate receptors in synaptic strengthening and other important mechanisms of experience-dependent plasticity. Since then, her lab has moved more into the study of learning, experimenting with new ways of automating animal training and assessing learning-dependent changes in cortical circuitry. This new line of work is extremely exciting for Alison, as many of the learning-related questions they are tackling involve interrogating the brain all the way from the level of individual molecules and synapses to large populations of neurons.
Alison thrives on interesting questions and exciting data. While she describes herself as impatient and overly-excited, she has come to accept her unique attributes that make her the scientist she is. With a laugh, she recalls, “There were times when we would get some data, and I would be so excited about it that I couldn’t sleep!” Today, as the leader of her own research group, she enjoys sharing that enthusiasm with the people in her lab. Although her love for interesting questions of all kinds led her on a somewhat meandering path to neuroscience, her impassioned curiosity for science has always driven her forward. Still, since even the earliest days of her lab she has always adhered strictly to eight hour workdays to ensure time for her other great passion: being a mom. And when she’s not in the lab or with her family, you might find her practicing her violin, experiencing firsthand the very changes in her brain that her lab is helping us begin to understand.
Find out more about the exciting research in Alison’s lab here.
Listen to Cristiana’s full interview with Alison on February 27th, 2020 below or wherever you get your podcasts!
