Dr. Kia Nobre
Head Department of Experimental Psychology
Director Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity
Chair Oxford Neuroscience Strategy Committee
Professorial Fellow St Catherine's College, Oxford
Professor Kia Nobre’s career has been shaped by several turning points (or "early life crises", as she calls them), but curiosity has been a constant driving force since she was a child. Her interest for the human mind was sparked when poor medical judgements left her baby brother with cerebral palsy and unable to see or hear. Kia remembers wondering what his inner world felt like for him. While her curiosity for understanding the brain (and its mind) was always there, it didn’t formally mature into an interest for the discipline of neuroscience until a few years later, during her undergraduate studies.
Choosing where to study for her undergraduate degree was Kia’s first "early life crisis," which ultimately facilitated her formal introduction to neuroscience. Her father didn’t want her to leave her home country of Brazil, worried that she would never come back. In the end, she opted for Williams College, a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, with the plan to return home afterwards. Little did she know at that point that her passion for neuroscience would take her to the other side of the world.
At Williams, she was blown away by a course in ‘physiological psychology’ (what we would today call ‘behavioural neuroscience’) and by her first experience in a lab. Neuroscience did not exist as a standard discipline then, so this was as close as it got. Under the supervision of Professor Paul Solomon, she worked on eye-blink conditioning in rabbits to study the role of the hippocampus and the cerebellum in memory. From that moment, Kia’s effort to understand the brain has been unstoppable.
After a year back in Rio de Janeiro to be closer to family and friends, she started a PhD programme at Yale, excited to have the opportunity to experience different labs before committing to a single project. She spent two years in the lab of Professor Gregory McCarthy, studying human brain activity during language processing by analysing intracranial recordings obtained during surgery in epileptic patients, as well as through other non-invasive recording methods (EEG and ERP, electroencephalogram and event-related potential, respectively) in healthy participants.
Around that time, neuroscientists had started reporting long-term potentiation (LTP) in animal models, shedding light onto the cellular basis by which connections between neurons change based on experience. These studies and their discoveries piqued Kia’s curiosity. Eager to dive deep into the mechanisms underlying how the brain works at the cellular level, Kia joined Professor Thomas Brown’s lab. There she investigated LTP mechanisms using single cell recordings and confocal microscopy in the rodent hippocampus.
Another pivotal crisis came at the end of the fifth year of her PhD. Kia realised that, although interesting, the questions she was trying to answer in the Brown lab could not shed light on inner workings of the human mind as she had hoped they might. ‘[It] was too far removed from my scientific soul,’ Kia explains. She moved back to Prof McCarthy’s lab and spent an intense year collecting all the data needed to submit her PhD thesis.
It was a very exciting time for Kia to come back: McCarthy’s lab was the first to publish a cognitive fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) study without using contrast agents—injected chemicals that until then were used to improve the quality of the pictures—pioneering this imaging technique. Kia decided to stay in the lab for her first post-doc, witnessing and contributing to one of the biggest breakthroughs in human neuroscience: the development of tools to observe the human brain at work. ‘It was a golden moment for me […] the sense of frontier, discovery and everything changing was unbelievable.’
For her second post-doc, Kia’s curiosity brought her to the lab of Professor Marsel Mesulam then at Harvard, attracted by his large-scale network approach to human neuroscience. There, she helped initiate fMRI studies on cognition and attention - focusing on how different brain areas interact with each other rather than considering their activity in isolation. Soon after, when Professor Mesulam moved to Chicago, Kia faced another critical turning point: to follow her PI (and help set up another facility in Chicago) or move forward on her own? The choice was not easy, and at the end Kia decided to follow her own path. Kia applied for a lectureship at the University of Oxford. This was combined with an offer of the first Oxford Junior Research Fellowship in Psychology (at New College) and converted to an independent Research Fellowship, which allowed her to start her independent career at Oxford. (She has also maintained an adjunct position linked to Mesulam’s group in Chicago ever since.)
To carry out human brain imaging while at Oxford, Kia collaborated with Professor Richard Frackowiak and other members of the pioneering Functional Imaging Laboratory at University College London. During this time Oxford’s brain imaging facility was still being established, and Kia set up the first non-invasive human neurophysiology lab for EEG and ERP studies. Kia has remained at the University of Oxford ever since, playing her part in the advancement of human neuroscience methods and discoveries. She is now the chair of Translational Cognitive Neuroscience, the director of the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity and the head of the Department of Experimental Psychology.
Kia describes her research path as a sandpit constantly evolving. Her scientific interests in the broad principles of brain organisation have led her to explore language and different aspects of attention. Over the years she also sees her approach to ‘doing’ science changing. Now, “I am more of a conductor or a workshop lead rather than an actor or an instrumentalist…” As a senior academic, Kia is internationally recognised, and she holds several positions of responsibilities at her institution and in the global scientific community. “Is this what I want to do forever?”, Kia ponders whether it will be soon time for her to take what she has learned from all her positions and give back to Science, contributing to bigger conversations on the role of science in society, education and policies. Kia hasn’t figured out how to approach this turning point yet. Undoubtedly her seminal contributions to understanding the human mind will remain an important legacy in science. Who can tell what more her next disruptive crisis will bring.
Find out more about Kia and her lab’s research here.
Check out Cristiana’s full interview with Kia on September 8th 2020 below or wherever you get your podcasts!
