Dr. Gabrielle Gutierrez
Postdoctoral Research Fellow Department of Applied Mathematics, University of Washington
Postdoctoral Research Fellow Group for Neural Theory, École Normale Supérieure
Ph.D. Brandeis University
Dr. Gabrielle Gutierrez was a senior at Barnard College when she took a study break that changed her entire academic trajectory. Though she had taken some introductory neuroscience and molecular biology courses early on in college, she was more interested in math and physics and had declared the latter as her major. During her senior year, she was working on a problem set for a course in waves and optics when she decided to check out a seminar given by Nancy Kopell about oscillations in the brain. Gabrielle was completely fascinated: “I had no idea the brain was a place [where] you could apply physics.” This marked the start of her journey in pursuit of a career in theoretical neuroscience.
After graduating from Barnard, Gabrielle decided to pursue a Ph.D. at Brandeis with Dr. Larry Abbott. He was one of the authors of Theoretical Neuroscience, a formative textbook she read as an undergraduate. In this textbook was “a whole lot of stuff [she] didn’t know yet,” and she reasoned that graduate school with one of the authors was the way to access that information. While programs at the time didn’t exclusively focus on computational neuroscience, Gabrielle knew that this is what she wanted to work on in the Abbott lab. However, in a “twist of irony,” the two ended up switching places: just as Gabrielle left New York for Brandeis, Larry Abbott moved his lab to Columbia.
While this wasn’t what Gabrielle had planned for, she calls it a “really really lucky break,” as she ended up in the lab of Dr. Eve Marder. There, she benefited from exceptional scientific training and mentorship. For her graduate work, Gabrielle used electrophysiology to study the stomatogastric ganglion of the crab. This work taught her to not judge a model system by its cover: she realized that she could begin to answer fundamental neuroscience questions from simple organisms and systems. She learned both wet lab techniques, and how to build computational models of smaller networks of neurons. Gabrielle also describes Dr. Marder as a “super mentor” who supported her throughout the ups and downs of her Ph.D. Having a mentor who could relate to her, encourage her, and most importantly, teach her not to internalize others’ biases, was fundamental to Gabrielle’s success during graduate school.
After graduating, Gabrielle knew she wanted to explore different facets of neuroscience research. She went on to do a postdoc in Dr. Sophie Deneve’s lab, the Group for Neural Theory, at the cole Normale Superiure in Paris. This experience forced her out of her comfort zone in more ways than one. In addition to moving abroad and having to learn how to navigate both a new language and culture, Gabrielle’s research in the Deneve lab zoomed way out from her Ph.D. work: she went from modeling the brain at the level of ion channels to the level of thoughts, which almost made her postdoc work feel like a second Ph.D. “It was a really great experience to be able to have such an adventure, and to go so bravely and so naively into all kinds of unknowns.
Though she was able to dive into the research she loved, her postdoc was also one of the hardest points of her career. She recalls a challenging summer at a course for computational neuroscience, where she had to balance anxiety and imposter syndrome with the rigorous academic demands of the course. The material was familiar, and she was studying exactly what she loved, but “I just couldn’t shake this feeling that I didn’t belong there.” This feeling was reinforced by a formative experience she had at the celebratory goodbye dinner, where a senior faculty member pulled her aside and told her that this probably wasn’t the field for her. After a difficult summer, this conversation confirmed all of Gabrielle’s doubts about herself, and she found herself questioning whether she should be in computational neuroscience -- or science at all.
It took Gabrielle a long time to move past this experience. She thought about jumping off the academic train and getting an industry job, but every time she considered leaving academia, she just couldn’t imagine doing anything else. She ultimately decided to double down on her pursuit of computational neuroscience, and obtained another postdoc position in the applied mathematics department at the University of Washington. Co-advised by Drs. Eric Shea-Brown and Fred Rieke, Gabrielle uses information theory to understand how neural circuits encode sensory information. Originally developed to study telephone communication, information theory takes into account that a system has a certain amount of bandwidth, coupled with a lot of noise, and studies how a meaningful signal gets transmitted to its final destination. She applies this theory to the visual system, trying to understand how the retina encodes the visual world and transforms visual signals so that the messages are not ambiguous.
Now, Gabrielle’s academic career has come full circle: she is returning to Barnard as a faculty member in the college’s new neuroscience department. Her lab’s work will draw heavily from what she learned in the Marder lab about the ways in which neuromodulators and adaptation processes change the functions of circuits, particularly across different contexts. She hopes her career will culminate in the understanding of the mechanisms by which neural circuits encode sensory information.
As she is gearing up to start her own lab, Gabrielle is adamant about taking the opposite approach to mentorship from what she encountered at the summer course. She reflects, “I just don’t think anyone should be told something like [what I was told],” and opts instead to emulate the type of mentorship and encouragement she received throughout her training, particularly from her Ph.D. advisor. It has taken a lot of reflection on Gabrielle’s part to realize that she, and many other young women trainees, often hold themselves to higher standards than they hold others. Though she was unaware at the time, she also realizes now that Barnard’s environment as a women’s college was formative in supporting her scientific growth, and she plans to pay it forward to her own trainees: “I will hopefully be shaping a new generation of young women, who may have been just as unsure as [I was], and who have lots of potential.” Her goal as a professor is to reach many young women who may doubt their fit in the world of computational neuroscience and give them the opportunity to succeed.
Find out more about Gabrielle and her research here.
Listen to Dakota’s interview with Gabrielle from February 2021 below or wherever you get your podcasts!
