Dr. Indira Turney
Postdoctoral Research Scientist Department of Neurology, Columbia University Medical Center
Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience Penn State University
In research, we often treat variability due to differences in life experience or environmental factors as a confound we must control for. Dr. Indira Turney flips this dogma on its head; she embraces this variability, asking how our differing life experiences shape our brain’s structure and function. More specifically, as a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia, Indira studies how racism and life experience impact aging and brain health.
Indira’s interest in aging stems, in part, from her experience growing up on a small island in the Caribbean. She witnessed her grandmother, as well as several other family and community members, battle memory loss as they aged. Her grandmother’s experience with dementia deeply impacted Indira -- she hoped to understand how the aging process could drive her grandmother to forget her favorite granddaughter.
Indira’s desire to understand the aging process had yet to take form as a potential career path by the time she began college at the University of the Virgin Islands. There, an undergraduate advisor suggested she pursue psychology as a major and introduced her to the idea of a career in research. However, Indira’s first foray into a clinical psychology lab in college left her unconvinced. She found the research too far removed from the neurological mechanisms underlying the psychological phenomena they studied. It was not until another undergraduate summer spent in a clinical neuroscience lab that she found her niche within the world of brain research. That summer, she studied how memory-related processes change in aging and multiple sclerosis using MRI. This more mechanistic approach piqued her interest, and the emphasis on aging aligned with her original, more personal, motivation for studying neuroscience.
Having found her passion for a career in research, Indira joined a predoctoral program at the University of Pittsburgh. While it was difficult to leave the community she had back home in the Caribbean, she was able to work (fully funded!) in a clinical neuroscience lab and was given the time and resources to build up her graduate school application. Subsequently, Indira was accepted into almost every graduate program she applied to and ultimately settled on a PhD program that required a much shorter move than her previous transition: just across Pennsylvania to Penn State University.
At Penn State, Indira joined the lab of Dr. Nancy Dennis, where she studied memory across the lifespan using MRI. Specifically, she investigated the brain networks that underlie the formation and recall of false memories -- memories that preserve general information about a past experience but have missing or incorrect details. She found that the network of brain regions activated during a false memory increase in variability across individuals as we age.
This variability in the aging process would provide a seed for Indira’s current postdoctoral work at Columbia, where she asks the question: How do our collected life experiences contribute to brain health disparities across aging? More specifically, Indira studies this question in the context of racism and socioeconomic status. Indira currently uses racially and ethnically diverse (White, Black, & Latinx) human subject cohorts: WHICAP (adults 65+ in the Upper Manhattan area) and Offspring (the adult children of WHICAP participants). For this group of individuals, Indira uses both MRI and comprehensive life history data to study the relationship between environmental and sociocultural factors and brain health across generations. Some preliminary findings in Indira’s work show racial disparities in brain health are already apparent in midlife, suggesting accelerated brain aging among Black adults. Although longitudinal data (i.e., more time points overtime) are necessary to reach a definitive conclusion, Indira’s work highlights how critical it is to examine brain health at earlier ages, and to identify and repair early life conditions that may drive disparities in midlife across race and ethnicity.
Indira predicts these discrepancies in aging are driven by systemic racism, including differences in opportunities and access. As she explains, “It’s not about how physically active I am, it’s how much access I have to a gym.” She hopes that understanding how lived experiences affect risk for dementia and other age-related brain changes will provide new insight to the entire field of aging research. This research is especially important given that Black and Latinx individuals are historically understudied in cognitive neuroscience but are also at greatest risk for Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD). Therefore, understanding the environmental factors that drive ADRD onset in a more representative population can fill in a large gap in our neuroscientific knowledge and help us understand how to reduce the prevalence and severity of aging-related conditions.
This innovative approach of combining neuroimaging, biological, and sociocultural data introduces many other questions, which Indira plans to answer as she continues to develop her independent research program. She aims to investigate these questions from other angles, including looking at how race and ethnicity interact with place of origin and brain aging. She hopes that these results will provide insight into the mechanisms of how racism and other lived experiences become embedded in the body, resulting in brain changes.
As Indira moves forward in her career, she is careful to contemplate challenges she faced in the past to ensure those who follow behind her don’t face the same obstacles. Particularly, Indira recounts the loss of community she felt when she started graduate school. Although Pittsburgh had been relatively diverse, the people she encountered while at Penn State were predominately white. This lack of diversity, coupled with the individualistic mentality that is often a part of laboratory research, contributed to feelings of imposter syndrome and culture shock, as Indira struggled to find people with shared life experiences and culture. With several other graduate students, Indira revived the Black Graduate Student Association, which became a community that she could turn to for support throughout her PhD and beyond. Now, as a postdoc, Indira focuses on building community spaces for Black and Indigenous people of color to help foster the sense of belonging and access to culturally-appropriate support that helped her through her academic journey.
A common thread running through Indira’s approach to her work is her sense of compassion and empathy -- her ambition to fully understand the variability in lived experiences that shape who we are, and her desire to right injustices that stem from them. It is this desire to delve deep into what shapes each individual that has driven her brilliant science and makes her a valuable asset to the neuroscientific community as a scientist, mentor and leader.
Listen to Nancy’s interview with Indira on July 23rd, 2021 below or wherever you get your podcasts!
