Dr. Deb Karhson
Research Scientist Stanford University
Postdoctoral Fellow Stanford University
PhD in Neuroscience Tulane University
When Dr. Deb Karhson began working in a neuroscience lab as an undergraduate, something clicked. “It was the answer to the question I didn’t know I was asking!” Deb recalls. While she had not set out to study the brain, several elements of her childhood had laid the groundwork for her eventual passion for neuroscience. Deb’s mother was a Montessori school teacher, so Deb was raised with a particular education philosophy that emphasized continuously asking questions and diving deeply into anything that sparked her interest. Furthermore, her brother is autistic, which meant that from a young age Deb was curious about the brain. She wanted to understand more about typical and atypical brain function and ways to improve her brother’s quality of life. Deb did not, however, originally see this as an academic pursuit. When she serendipitously landed in a learning and memory lab for some hands-on lab experience as a pre-med student, Deb suddenly realized that neuroscience was, in fact, the perfect combination of her strengths and interests. Today Deb is a research scientist at Stanford University, on the precipice of opening her own lab focused on translational autism research.
At the time she discovered the field of neuroscience, Deb was a biomedical engineering major at Drexel University and was planning to attend medical school. Despite her excitement in the research that she was doing as an undergraduate, Deb might not have seen academia as an attractive career path had it not been for the PhD students in the lab. Deb had been under the impression that the focus of academia was teaching, but the graduate students explained that a career in science was so much more than that – it was about making discoveries. “I didn’t want to teach as much as I wanted to run my hands through curiosities on a daily basis,” Deb remembers. Once she realized that that was a viable career path, she dove into it with gusto.
However, the road was not without stumbling blocks. After receiving her bachelor’s degree, Deb entered the neuroscience PhD program at Baylor. But the program was not the right fit for her, and after experiencing extensive anxiety and unhappiness, she ultimately left. While she was trying to figure out where to go from there, someone suggested to Deb that perhaps neuroscience research was not the best career path for her. When she tried wrapping her head around doing something else, though, she kept coming back to the feeling that this was the only thing she wanted to do. So, she tried again, this time at Tulane. Even just from the Tulane interviews, where she felt a strong connection to the other students, Deb could tell that this was going to be an entirely different graduate experience. It was, and she began to thrive.
At Tulane, Deb joined the lab of Dr. Edward Golob. Edward studied auditory processing in humans using electroencephalography (EEG). He was at first surprised that a student set on studying autism would want to join his lab, as he had no experience with autism research. But even as a first-year graduate student, Deb foresaw the advantages and possibilities of using EEG to study autism in human subjects. She was also excited to focus on auditory processing, which is an area of strength among autistic compared to neurotypical individuals. While many autism researchers focus on studying deficits, Deb loved the idea of exploring a facet of brain function that was heightened in those with autism; she thought this was a more promising path towards making discoveries that might improve quality of life. In her graduate work, Deb found neural signatures of increased bottom-up auditory processing in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This phenomenon causes them to experience sounds at higher resolution without impairing their ability to attend to those sounds in a goal-directed manner. Her findings illuminate a neural mechanism underlying heightened sensory processing in autism, but also demonstrate how increased neural resources dedicated to processing those sounds might contribute to sensory overload in everyday life.
As she was finishing her PhD, Deb knew that she wanted to venture more into the field of drug discovery, as this was the first step to the quality-of-life outcomes she was seeking. Based on some anecdotal evidence, she became interested in endocannabinoids as an intervention for those with ASD who exhibit maladaptive, self-injurious behaviors. Unfortunately, the standard of care in these cases is to prescribe antipsychotics, which often leave patients feeling sick. Looking for scientific data on endocannabinoids in this context, she did not find much. So, she decided to create the data herself. After graduating, Deb accepted a postdoctoral position at Stanford University. Working with Drs. Karen Parker, Antonio Hardan, and Allan Reiss – all of whom brought different expertise to the table – Deb discovered that a cohort of individuals with ASD had lower levels of circulating anandamide (an endogenous endocannabinoid) in their blood compared to neurotypical subjects. Deb feels that this is just the tip of the iceberg of understanding how the endocannabinoid system – an incredibly complicated and multi-faceted system – might be altered or manipulated in individuals with ASD, an equally complicated and heterogeneous disorder. Having finished her postdoc, Deb is now working as a research scientist at Stanford as she applies for faculty positions. When she starts her own lab, Deb is excited to dive deeper into unravelling the complicated endocannabinoid system in the ASD population.
In addition to thinking about her future research plan, Deb has thought extensively about mentorship and the type of mentor she wants to be for her future students. She believes that an important component of mentorship is that both people understand what the other needs and expects out of the mentor-mentee relationship. Furthermore, she feels strongly that good mentorship is not telling someone what to do, but rather helping them think through who they want to be and what they want to do. She also sees keeping morale high as a crucial role for a mentor – helping buoy the mentee when times get difficult and self-doubt creeps in. Deb remembers that during her PhD, whenever she entered the gym for capoeira, her friends were constantly celebrating her accomplishments and cheering her on towards earning her PhD. “It was so critical to my success,” Deb says, and she wants to provide the same moral support to her future mentees.
Another crucial buoying force for Deb has been the Black in Neuro community. Before the Black in Neuro effort sprung into being in summer of 2020, Deb did not know a single other Black researcher who studied autism in humans. Having attended an engineering magnet high school, she grew up surrounded by Black excellence in science, and thus it was strange for her to see fewer and fewer Black scientists as she progressed through the stages of an academic career. Deb found it challenging to look at a field she wanted to be a part of and not see anyone with whom she identified, a challenge compounded by the burden of wondering whether she might be the first Black researcher in a given department or subfield. While the Black in Neuro effort has given Deb a stronger sense of community within neuroscience, as she applies for faculty positions, she still sees many departments with a stark lack of diversity. But this is not influencing where she applies. “I belong anywhere,” Deb says with a smile. “People would be lucky to have me!”
Departments would indeed be lucky to have Deb among their faculty. Throughout her early career she has shown tremendous foresight for bringing together diverse and often novel approaches and perspectives (such as auditory neuroscience and the endocannabinoid system) to answer the questions about ASD that have motivated her since she was a child. And in addition to the joy she finds in “running her hands through curiosities,” it is evident that Deb cares deeply about the population she is studying. She hopes to eventually see the ideal of personalized medicine come to fruition – that one day, patients will be assessed and treated in a way that is best suited and most efficient for them as individuals. Surely Deb’s own work will be an important piece that pushes the field of translational neuroscience towards this goal.
Listen to Megan’s full interview with Deb on October 23rd, 2020 below or wherever you get your podcasts!
