Dr. Maya Opendak
Assistant Professor, Kennedy Krieger Institute & Johns Hopkins University
Postdoctoral Fellow, New York University
Ph.D., Neuroscience, Princeton University
When Dr. Maya Opendak was a child, she was drawn to science the same way many other young scientists of her generation have been: through the ultimate wisdom of Bill Nye the Science Guy. Specifically, Maya remembers loving his episode on “The Brain”. However, as she grew older, her love for reading inspired her to major in English when she started her undergraduate degree at Columbia University. Early in her degree, Maya realized that much of her passion for literature was actually a manifestation of her fascination with the human experience, so she decided to take a few psychology classes. Concluding that scientific approaches to studying subjective experience were what interested her most, she changed her major to psychology and dove into neuroscience in order to understand how all human experience can be contained in a single organ–the brain. Now, Maya studies how early life events can shape our brain’s development and experiences throughout adulthood at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she is an Assistant Professor at the Kennedy Krieger Institute and the Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience.
As a sophomore undergraduate, Maya joined the lab of Dr. Peter Balsam, where she spent three years on her thesis project studying the role of memory in time perception in humans. Although she wasn't interested in animal research originally, after taking an animal behavior class she was utterly fascinated by a lecture about the ethological study of songbirds. The lecture sparked her curiosity about how animal research could be used to learn more about the brain. The summer before her senior year, she completed an REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) at NYU with Dr. Joseph LeDoux where she studied fear memory in rats. These experiences in the Balsam and LeDoux labs, especially her REU with her mentor Dr. Lorenzo Diaz-Mataix, inspired Maya to go to graduate school, where she planned to study memory.
Maya applied to graduate programs and was accepted into the lab of Dr. Elizabeth Gould at Princeton University. During her PhD, she studied how ethologically relevant challenges like food shortages or social stress could alter the way new neurons are born in the adult brain and thereby, how animals behave. In order to do this, Maya used a brand-new behavioral technique. First, she established two separate colonies of adult rats, each with their own naturally emerging social dominance hierarchies. Then, she switched the dominant rats between the two colonies, causing a major social disruption. She found that as a result of this disruption and resulting stress, all of the rats showed decreased adult neurogenesis, or a decrease in the number of new neurons that grew in the adult rat’s brains. Interestingly, neurons that were born during the disruption were directly involved in future social behavior, including avoidance of new, unfamiliar rats. Maya concluded that a social hierarchy disruption–even very briefly–could impact neurogenesis and make lasting changes to social behavior strategies.
With a successful project under her wing, Maya looked towards postdoc positions. She was proud of her PhD work, but was increasingly interested in the translational potential of her research, especially how it could improve outcomes of early-life adversity in children. Maya reached out to Dr. Regina Sullivan, a professor at NYU who studies attachment, fear, and trauma in infant rat pups. Rat pups are not only tiny and delicate, but they also have completely different behavior compared to adults. In order to abide by the constraints of ethological neuroscience, every manipulation needed to be relevant to the rat pup’s role and niche in their environments and social communities. “It was like an avalanche of new knowledge that I needed in order to effectively ask these questions about the development of social behavior,” she recalls. Ultimately, in her postdoctoral research, Maya employed an ethologically designed paradigm of early-life adversity where a mother was given insufficient bedding, causing her to roughly handle her pups. This approach led to increased dopamine levels in the pups’ amygdalas, a brain area associated with fear, and this led to later disruptions in the pups’ social behavior, both with their mother and with peers. This was an interesting result because the presence of a mother usually buffers negative effects of stress. However, Maya’s results indicated that when the mother is present during the stress, buffering effects go away. Furthermore, she was able to replicate this result in a more traditional, non-ethological experiment. In addition to running these behavioral paradigms during her postdoc, Maya also worked to adapt many modern neuroscientific tools involving viral approaches, including optogenetics, to assess brain circuits in rat pups. These techniques were invaluable to her next step: starting her own lab at the Kennedy Krieger Institute and Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Since her lab opened in August 2021, Maya has been employing the techniques she helped develop to uncover the roles of dopamine in social behavior, as well as adding chemogenetics, calcium imaging, and fiber photometry. She’s also interested in studying the lateral habenula and its associated circuits. The lateral habenula plays an important role in controlling dopamine release, but very little is known about its development. She hopes that studying these targets and working with clinical collaborators will help the field gain translational insights into how social information is processed during–and as a result of–early-life adversity so we can develop interventions to better ameliorate its effects in humans.
While Maya has earned her fair share of successes in her career, she has also encountered obstacles. However, she has always found a way to recover from personal challenges and the consequences of her mistakes with creativity and perseverance. For instance, the social hierarchy disruption paradigm she wrote her dissertation on came from a serendipitous mistake. She originally intended to switch a dominant and a subordinate, but accidentally switched the dominant of one colony with the dominant of another instead. Despite the initial switch being an error, the result was a rich behavioral sample and the project was an overall success. Then, during her postdoc when she was learning so many new techniques, Maya struggled with imposter syndrome. She felt intimidated and doubted her ability to succeed as a PI, leading to a crisis of confidence. In her despair, she called her mother for advice, who asked her bluntly, “Why don’t you just quit?” Instantly she knew what to do: “Well, I’m not going to quit, so then I realized that I had to fully invest.” In the coming years, Maya poured herself into her work and allowed herself to get emotionally invested in her dreams of being a PI.
Fully investing in herself has paid off for Maya. Driven by her long-standing fascination with the human experience, Maya has turned her dream of running a lab into reality, accepting a tenure track position at Johns Hopkins. Her lab's work will undoubtedly hold great potential for the future of translational research and treatment interventions to ameliorate the consequences of early-life adversity. Decades after her interest was sparked by an episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy, Maya has forged a career in science and is poised to improve the lives of the next generation of children. Perhaps someday a child that benefits from Maya's work will be inspired to follow in her footsteps.
Find out more about Maya and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Nancy’s full interview with Maya on January 31, 2022 below!
