Dr. Nancy Padilla Coreano
Assistant Professor University of Florida, McKnight Brain Institute
Postdoctoral Fellow Salk Institute of Biological Studies
PhD in Neuroscience Columbia University
Dr. Nancy Padilla Coreano’s interest in the brain wasn’t born in a science classroom or from a particular scientist role model; it came from music. Nancy is from a family of musicians in Puerto Rico and initially followed in their footsteps, attending a public middle and high school that specialized in music. Always one to embrace a new learning opportunity, Nancy excelled and even considered a career as a classical pianist. Yet, as she advanced and was spending more and more time practicing and performing, she started feeling bored. Her natural hunger for learning was no longer satisfied, and she felt that time spent at the piano was time not spent learning something new and impactful. Although her science classes at the time provided little inspiration, she happened upon Oliver Sacks’ book Musicophilia and his other essays about music and the brain. She was fascinated by music’s ability to evoke emotions, and once she understood that she could build a career on studying this phenomenon, she never looked back. Nancy’s neuroscience journey ultimately led her towards the study of social cognition instead of music, yet her love of learning and enthusiasm for the brain has remained constant. Nancy is now a L’Oreal Women in Science Fellow and a Burroughs Wellcome Fellow, not to mention the original founder of Stories of WiN! Already an emerging leader in the field of social systems neuroscience, Nancy is now on the precipice of starting her own lab at the University of Florida.
Even after discovering the wonders of the brain, Nancy didn’t immediately know that she wanted to do scientific research. Oliver Sacks was a neurologist, so she decided that she would pursue neurology as well. As an undergraduate at the University of Puerto Rico, she was looking for research experience that would ultimately benefit her medical school application when another student researcher introduced her to the “Fear Lab”, run by Dr. Gregory Quirk. Nancy decided to start volunteering in what just so happened to be the only R01-funded lab at her institution and possibly on the whole island. The Fear Lab’s funding provided certain resources for Nancy’s undergraduate work that would have been difficult to find in a different lab. Driven by her innate curiosity and under the devoted mentorship of Dr. Quirk, Nancy quickly fell in love with research. While chatting with graduate students in the lab, she learned about the possibility of getting paid to pursue a PhD in neuroscience, and thus her plans for medical school rapidly transformed into plans for graduate school. This transition was facilitated by the MARC program at the University of Puerto Rico, an NIH-funded program to provide financial support and professional development opportunities for students interested in grad school. Nancy credits this program with helping her obtain a summer research internship at MIT and ultimately applying successfully to graduate schools. Dr. Quirk’s mentorship was also particularly influential; his high expectations combined with endless encouragement helped inspire Nancy to pursue a path in academia. To this day, Dr. Quirk’s commitment to his trainees serves as a model of impactful mentorship that Nancy hopes to emulate in her own lab.
Nancy decided to attend Columbia University for graduate school, a decision that was motivated not only by the quality of the program, but also because she had friends in New York City. As a highly social person who was moving far away from home for the first time, she felt it was important to have a community. Through her research rotations at Columbia, Nancy ultimately gravitated towards studying emotional behaviors and the prefrontal cortex (PFC) as she had done in the Fear Lab, but from a different angle. While her undergraduate research had focused on conditioned fear, Nancy began studying innate anxiety behaviors for her PhD research in the laboratory of Dr. Joshua Gordon. She was particularly interested in a specific pathway from the hippocampus to the PFC, as theta rhythmic synchrony between these areas seemed to relate to anxiety. Nancy used optogenetics - which was still a relatively new tool at the time - to manipulate these brain areas, and she found causal evidence that theta rhythms in this pathway drive anxiety-like behaviors in rodents. While this work yielded multiple, exciting publications that enhanced our understanding of anxiety circuits, her PhD training wasn’t without its challenges. Nancy's inclination to compare herself to others, combined with a general “boys' club” atmosphere, exacerbated her insecurities. As she transitioned from her PhD into her postdoc, Nancy reflected on her graduate school experience and knew there was one thing she wanted to change. As a postdoc, she planned to set personal goals and focus only on those. When she stopped comparing herself to others, Nancy continued to produce excellent science but was happier while doing so.
Although Nancy at times questioned whether she wanted to pursue an academic career, by the time she graduated, she at least knew that she wanted to continue her research training as a postdoc. She joined the laboratory of Dr. Kay Tye at MIT (now at the Salk Institute) and became interested in the neural circuits underlying social hierarchies. Mice are highly social animals and will adjust their behaviors according to whether a fellow mouse is of a higher or lower rank. Nancy wanted to better understand how social rank is represented in the brain, so she devised a new behavioral task that involved pitting two mice of different ranks against one another to compete for a reward. This provided a structured context in which she could measure behavior and neural activity using computer vision and electrophysiology. Not only did Nancy decipher neural representations of rank in the mouse PFC, but she found she could also influence dominance behaviors by manipulating a particular pathway from the PFC to hypothalamus. As Nancy prepares to start her own lab at the University of Florida, she is eager to continue taking a systems neuroscience approach to studying social dominance behaviors as well as other forms of “social competence”, or the ability to optimize social behavior using available information. She also hopes to more deeply probe social behaviors and underlying circuits in mouse models of social disorders, such as autism, to better understand the root of impaired social competence.
Nancy’s commitment to exciting, impactful, and cutting-edge science is rivaled only by her equal commitment to making the field of neuroscience a more equitable place. This commitment is manifest in her creation of Stories of WiN. The project was born out of encountering her own biases; as a postdoctoral representative on a neurosciences seminar committee at MIT, she was shocked to realize that every single speaker nominated by trainees - including herself - were men. Nancy was horrified, not only by this glaring inequity but also by the fact that even when aware, she still struggled to come up with women’s names. There is no lack of women neuroscientists doing groundbreaking and exciting research, but they are often - for a variety of reasons - less visible than their male counterparts. Nancy wanted to create a project dedicated to increasing the visibility of women in the field. In further developing the project, the vision expanded, and the goal became not only to highlight women’s scientific research, but also to emphasize their personal and scientific journeys. Nancy reflects upon having benefited personally from connecting with so many other inspiring women neuroscientists and seeing bits of herself in all of their stories. In particular, the overwhelming prevalence of imposter syndrome described by so many women - even those more advanced in their careers - has normalized the experience for her and helped her to overcome her own feelings of self-doubt. Nancy hopes that this project is having a broader impact and that other aspiring scientists, too, may find sources of comfort and inspiration in these stories.
And now, Nancy is on the other side: herself the subject of one of these stories. Her own scientific discoveries, together with the successes and challenges encountered along the way, may be a source of new-found inspiration for readers and listeners who see bits of themselves in Nancy.
Find out more about Nancy and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Megan & Catie’s interview with Nancy on March 16, 2021 below or wherever you get your podcasts!
