Dr. Charlotte Stagg
From medical student to neuroscience researcher and professor, Dr. Charlotte (Charlie) Stagg describes her career as a series of happy accidents and fortuitous lightbulb moments. This journey was made possible by her long-standing fascination with neurophysiology, and the support of her mentors, peers, and students.
Professor of Human Neurophysiology, University of Oxford
Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Oxford
DPhil in Neuroscience, University of Oxford
Medicine, University of Bristol
Charlie had a keen interest in science from an early age, revealing her dream of becoming a research scientist in her primary school yearbook at the age of ten. Despite this early aspiration, she became ‘distracted’ by the idea of becoming a medical doctor during her teenage years and applied to study physiology and medicine at the University of Bristol as an undergraduate. It was here that she first became fascinated in stroke and stroke recovery. Charlie vividly remembers sitting in a lecture on stroke in her second year of medical school. She was shocked to discover that while stroke is one of the most common causes of neurological disability, precisely how people recover from it is poorly understood. “I just thought, that’s crazy! How can we not know how people recover from it?”. She emerged from that lecture inspired to explore this further: a lightbulb moment that would eventually propel her into the world of neuroscience research.
The more she delved into the literature the more she became fascinated by how little is known about the brain, particularly how we learn. Given that acquiring new skills is such a central part of our lives, she was astounded by our limited understanding of the physiological mechanisms underpinning learning. As part of her medical degree, she completed an intercalated degree in physiology that exposed her to non-invasive brain recording and stimulation techniques such as EEG and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). These experiences, combined with several short research placements in the later years of her medical degree, intensified both her interest in human neurophysiology and her passion for research.
After qualifying as a junior doctor, she quickly realised that medicine was not the career for her. “Nobody actually asked me the question of whether I liked patients or, more importantly, whether I fainted at the sight of blood!”. It was a difficult and controversial decision, but she eventually decided to hang up her stethoscope and pursue a career in research instead. She moved to the University of Oxford to embark on a PhD (DPhil) using advanced neuroimaging to study how the brain learns new motor skills under the supervision of Dr. Paul Matthews and Dr. Heidi Johansen-Berg. Her PhD focused on exploring the neurochemical signatures of motor learning using magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS).
Charlie’s PhD was an exciting but challenging time. Coming from a clinical environment with limited background in neuroscience or academic research, the start of her PhD represented a steep learning curve. Peoples’ skepticism that she was throwing away a career as a medical doctor, combined with moments of imposter syndrome and feelings of frustration when things went wrong, had her questioning at times whether leaving medicine had been the right decision. Reflecting on her PhD experience, Charlie acknowledges that her stubbornness and desire to prove herself may have hindered her ability to ask for help in those early days. Now a mentor herself, she’s come to realise how invested her PhD supervisors were in her and wishes she had felt more comfortable asking for advice at the time. It took until around the end of her first year when she started getting results that her confidence and passion for research returned. Charlie’s PhD work culminated in the discovery that motor learning is associated with a decrease in inhibition via a reduction in the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA in the motor cortex. This observation represented an exciting step towards understanding the mechanisms underlying motor learning.
After her PhD, Charlie continued to work in Oxford alongside Heidi Johansen-Berg for her postdoctoral work, complemented by concentrated research periods at University College London and the University of Miami. The choice to remain in Oxford for her postdoc, and later when setting up her own lab, was motivated by a mixture of personal and academic reasons. She had a partner living in London at the time, and later had two children, so uprooting her life to pursue a postdoc elsewhere was neither practical nor appealing. “I think it’s very easy to think that the only model is: do your PhD, do a postdoc in one place, do a postdoc in another place, go somewhere else for tenure…but I think increasingly people are realising that’s not for everyone”, she says. Working in a supportive and collaborative academic environment had always been a priority for her, and she felt that Oxford provided a good home for her family while enabling her to do the best science possible.
In 2014, Charlie was awarded a Sir Henry Dale Fellowship by the Wellcome Trust and the Royal Society to support her to set up her own research group. Her group focuses on understanding the neurophysiological changes underpinning motor learning in humans, both in healthy subjects and after brain injuries such as stroke. Using the findings from this research, her team is also working to develop novel strategies to aid stroke recovery using transcranial stimulation to drive motor learning. She describes the transition from student and scientist to mentor and manager as a challenge she tried to face head on. While PhD and postdoctoral work shapes a trainee into a competent scientist, running a lab relies on a very different skill set. She sought out training and courses to gain some managerial experience and tried to cultivate a culture of support, teamwork, and personal growth in her team from the very beginning. While she admits she found taking a step back and giving students the freedom to do their own thing daunting at first, she believes it is essential for allowing students to develop as scientists and is incredibly proud of everything her students (past and present) have achieved.
Charlie notes that as you progress through a career in science, you are inevitably labeled as someone who does a particular kind of research. In her case, she makes a conscious effort to push herself out of her academic comfort zone and learn new skills - both for her own ongoing scientific development and to better support her students and collaborators. While the majority of her published work to date has dealt with human subjects, her lab has recently begun to incorporate more translational projects involving rodent models. “[I’d become] very familiar with the techniques and it all felt very comfortable…the challenge of learning something completely new really reinvigorated my thinking and science, as well as allowing us to answer some interesting scientific questions”. She was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship to support these efforts just a few weeks ago, and is hugely excited for what lies on the scientific horizons for her and her group in the coming years.
Find out more about Charlotte and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Caitlin’s full interview with Charlotte on January 6, 2022 below!
