Dr. Verónica de la Fuente
Group Leader at CONICET & Instructor Universidad de Buenos Aires
Postdoctoral Fellow Universidad de Buenos Aires
PhD in Neuroscience Universidad de Buenos Aires
Dr. Verónica de la Fuente can pinpoint the three days in which her passion for neuroscience was born. She was an undergraduate in a six-year biology track at Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), and a friend invited her to the “Taller Argentino de Neurociencias”, a neuroscience workshop. About 100-200 neuroscientists gathered in a hotel in a small village in the middle of Argentina, far from any bars or restaurants like one might find surrounding a conference center in a big city. For three days, Verónica was immersed in deep, stimulating discussions about the brain. The workshop had been organized by young scientists who wanted to revitalize the field in Argentina, and their energy was contagious. “I wanted to be a part of that community,” she remembers. Today, Verónica is an instructor at Universidad de Buenos Aires and a new group leader at Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), a national institution that funds most fellowships and salaries of scientists in Argentina. She is indeed a rising member of the vibrant neuroscience community that first won her heart in the middle of that small village.
When Verónica returned from the workshop, she enrolled in more classes related to neuroscience and began to work in a neuroscience laboratory. Young neuroscience students organized “Neurocenas” or “Neuro Dinners” – seminars combined with a social aspect that further deepened Verónica’s connection to the community. After graduating, she stayed at UBA to earn a PhD. In the lab of Dr. Arturo Romano, Verónica studied the cellular and molecular mechanisms underlying different phases of memory. Specifically, she investigated how pharmacological manipulation of NFkB, a molecule that regulates gene expression, affects the reconsolidation and extinction of memories. She discovered a novel mechanism by which an enzyme called calcineurin negatively regulates NFkB signaling in the context of memory consolidation and reconsolidation.
Verónica remained in the Romano lab for her postdoc but decided that she wanted to expand her field of view, moving from molecular to circuits-based work. She started a collaboration with a lab at a nearby medical center that was using positron emission tomography (PET) to probe which brain regions increase their glucose consumption (a measure of increased neural activity) during memory reconsolidation. She then tested the specific functions of these regions in the context of different memory phases. Verónica discovered that inhibiting the lateral neocortex during memory reconsolidation affects glucose metabolism in the amygdala, underscoring the importance of this circuit in memory reactivation. She also began a collaboration with the laboratory "Grupo de Neurociencias de Sistemas," examining the role of the lateral habenula in memory processing. As she starts her own research group, Verónica wants to use her experience studying memory circuitry as a jumping off point from which to delve into circuit-level comparisons of direct learning versus learning via social interaction and observation.
Verónica is not only thinking about the science she wants to do, but also about the type of mentor she wants to be. “I don’t want people to work FOR me,” she says. “I want a team, with all the participants in the team working towards the same goal. The team will succeed if everyone on the team succeeds and is happy.” While she wants her group to succeed as a unit, she realizes that, within that unit, each trainee is an individual with a unique personality and distinct needs. One of Verónica’s main strategies for catering to these differences is to encourage and maintain open communication with her trainees. She wants to understand each of their expectations for their time in the lab as well as their long-term career aspirations so that she can help them reach those goals. Verónica acknowledges that this will likely involve sending her trainees abroad for fellowships, collaborations, courses, and conferences – experiences that will open doors for their futures. While she is focused on the success of her group members, there is one thing that is more important than success: respect. “I want my lab to be, above all, respectful,” Verónica says. “I want people to respect each other, their thoughts, their ideas, their personalities, their differences.”
Being an effective mentor also can mean recognizing and accommodating trainees’ challenges outside the lab. Verónica is no stranger to these challenges. Having had her first daughter at 20, her second at the beginning of her PhD, and her third 15 days after defending her thesis, motherhood has always been tightly intertwined with Verónica’s career as a scientist. While balancing the two has often been difficult, sometimes science has serendipitously brought her family closer together. When Verónica was awarded a Fulbright to study in Dr. Kay Tye’s lab at MIT, she was faced with a dilemma. The Fulbright scholarship was meant to fund one person, not a family of five, and she did not want to leave her daughters behind in Argentina. She called the father of her first daughter, who had left Argentina years before and was living in Boston. Verónica asked if she and her family could stay with him during her Fulbright, and he immediately agreed – they both recognized how nice it could be for their families to meld together. Despite often putting in grueling 14-hour days in the lab that summer, being able to see her daughters when she got home meant the world to her.
In addition to her time in the Tye lab, Verónica did several other short stays in labs outside of Argentina, including a memorable one in Dr. Lex Kravitz’s lab, where she was first introduced to both circuits neuroscience and the concept of open science. Open science is a particularly crucial tool for success in Argentina, where there are fewer resources available for research. As a group leader, Verónica wants to maintain close collaborations abroad, in part to compensate for the scarcity of grant money available in her home country. But these will not just be collaborations out of necessity. Verónica feels strongly that the best model of a scientific community is one with far more collaboration, not just within institutions or cities but worldwide. She believes that science would progress far more quickly if neuroscientists with different backgrounds and perspectives worked together on the biggest questions in the field. She emphasizes the fact that while scientists in Argentina and other developing countries may not have the same access to certain research tools and technologies, their ideas and hypotheses are no less brilliant.
Verónica encourages more students to join STEM fields in Argentina, particularly women. While Argentina is far ahead of the curve in terms of having roughly equal numbers of male and female scientists, the hierarchies of power within scientific institutions are still far from equitable. Women have to fight harder for their work to be visible. However, Verónica hopes that this disparity does not dissuade any young female students from pursuing a career in the field. “If you want to do science, just do it!” she urges. It was a sense of community that originally brought Verónica to the field of neuroscience, and she believes it is the strong, supportive network of female scientists across Latin America that will help to eventually dismantle the power imbalance. Undoubtedly, young female STEM students in Argentina will be inspired by Verónica for many years to come.
Listen to Nancy’s full interview with Verónica on December 19th, 2020 below or wherever you get your podcasts!
