Dr. Lucina Uddin
Professor University of California, Los Angeles
Postdoctoral Fellow Stanford University and New York University School of Medicine
Ph.D. in Psychology/Cognitive Neuroscience University of California, Los Angeles
Dr. Lucina Q. Uddin, a cognitive neuroscientist studying cognitive flexibility, knows better than almost anyone the fallacy of the adage that “we only use 10% of our brains”. And yet that very myth was what first sparked her interest in the brain. What mysteries might the other 90% hold? Even after she came to learn how inaccurate the statement was, Lucina never lost that original spark of interest, and it set her future career in neuroscience in motion. After a successful early career at the University of Miami, Lucina is now transitioning into a new appointment as a Professor and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Analysis Core at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.
Lucina’s early curiosity about the brain solidified when she started college and had to pick a major. She describes her decision to select neuroscience as more of a “process of elimination” - she really wasn’t sure what she wanted to do, but she remembered her early interest in the brain and decided to select neuroscience. Initially she was swayed towards taking the pre-med track - in part because so many of her fellow neuroscience majors were taking that route, and also because having been raised as a child of immigrants from Bangladesh left her with the strong perception that a medical career was one sure path to success in the US. However, she eventually realized that a medical career was not for her. So, out of “a little bit of wanting to keep learning more about the brain, and a little bit of not wanting to go to medical school”, she applied to PhD programs in neuroscience.
When she first applied to graduate schools, Lucina had aspirations of studying consciousness but limited prior laboratory experience and little grasp of the immense breadth of the neuroscience field. Although her applications to neuroscience programs were initially unsuccessful, through that process, she met Dr. Eran Zaidel, a professor at UCLA who would ultimately become her PhD advisor. He was the first one who advised her that psychology programs might be a better fit for her interests and facilitated her admission to that graduate program at UCLA. Lucina describes him as her first “mentor and champion” in neuroscience; he saw promise in her and decided to take her on as a student, and in so doing changed the course of her career. Fortuitously, his lab was one of the major groups studying the split-brain phenomenon in patients who had undergone a surgical procedure to sever connections between their cerebral hemispheres, resulting in each hemisphere acting independently as opposed to in concert as in most individuals; this fit in nicely with her interests in consciousness. However, she ultimately took a different approach to studying consciousness for her PhD research. Her project focused on self-recognition - specifically, how the brain processes images of one’s own face. Through this work, Lucina gained experience in multiple cognitive neuroscience techniques including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Towards the end of her PhD, she also started another project to study self-perception in individuals with autism, and this line of research further sparked her curiosity. When it came time to decide what to do next, she decided to follow that interest into postdoctoral research in pediatric neuroscience.
Lucina went on to gain further experience and expertise in cognitive neuroscience through two postdoctoral positions. She first worked with Dr. Xavier Castellanos at the New York University School of Medicine, where she started studying resting-state functional connectivity in different patient and neurotypical populations. This research involved collecting large fMRI datasets from individuals who were put in a scanner without any explicit task instructions. By then examining the spontaneous, “task-free” brain activity in these individuals, one can use sophisticated signal processing and data analytic methods to examine how activity moves through different areas of the brain and thus reconstruct functional brain “networks”. Lucina then moved to Stanford University to work in the laboratory of Dr. Vinod Menon, where she gained further expertise in these methods through close collaborations with an interdisciplinary group of computer scientists, engineers, psychiatrists, and psychologists. Through this work, Lucina became interested in a particular brain structure called the insular cortex, which is a key player in a functional brain network that responds to salient internal or external events - appropriately called the “salience network”. Moreover, the insula appeared to be a common site of atypical activity patterns in a wide range of neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders; for instance, Lucina found that hyperconnectivity within the salience network was highly predictive of autism diagnosis and symptom severity. Moving on from her postdoc into a faculty position, Lucina was interested in studying whether and how dysfunction of the insula might be causally related to some of the key characteristics of autism and other related disorders.
As Lucina established her own lab at the University of Miami, her research continued to evolve and ultimately led her towards focusing on cognitive flexibility in both neurotypical and atypical populations. This line of work began because, contrary to her initial hypothesis that atypical insular function might be related to some of the social communication deficits in autism, she found that it was more closely linked to restricted and repetitive behaviors - other core features of autism. This started her and her nascent lab down the path of studying the brain systems and dynamics involved in executive functions and cognitive flexibility (or inflexibility). She now studies this in many contexts - not just in autism, but also in aging, ADHD, depression, as well as in typical development. These diverse directions are often initiated by her trainees, whom - in the spirit of her graduate advisor and other influential mentors - she actively encourages to pursue their individual interests. Lucina recently moved her lab and returned to her PhD and undergraduate alma mater - UCLA!
While her own research path followed a relatively linear trajectory, her experiences have played a major role in how Lucina mentors and supports her own trainees. She recalls the most challenging time of her journey as being on the job market; she first started applying for faculty jobs in 2008 - just as the financial market crashed - and persisted each year until she finally received some offers in 2012. She remembers that time as one of considerable stress and uncertainty. She is thankful to have had a K award from the NIH that afforded her the necessary financial flexibility to be on the job market for multiple years, but she is keenly aware that that is not the case for everyone. She makes a point of being realistic with trainees and supporting them however she can - whether that is in their applications for academic positions, or in helping them find opportunities in other industries. She also recognizes the immense value of taking the time to curate other skills and seek out other opportunities during one’s scientific training to sample different possible career paths - in part because she had not always been well-versed in the alternatives to academia. In striving to support her students and colleagues in a holistic manner, she is also involved in many advocacy efforts for promoting diversity, equity, and inclusivity in the field (for instance, by recently arguing for more inclusive evaluation metrics in academia). Even though the road to a faculty position was a long and strenuous one, Lucina has proven that she is precisely the sort of PI the field wants and needs - one who is not only an exceptional and innovative (and cognitively flexible!) scientist, but also one who is trying to create the best possible future for the next generation.
Find out more about Lucina and her research here.
Check out Megan’s full interview with Lucina on July 2nd, 2021 below or wherever you get your podcasts!
