Dr. Caroline Palavicino-Maggio
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry McLean Hospital Harvard Medical School
Postdoctoral Fellow Harvard Medical School
PhD in Neuropharmocology & Neurophysiology Rutgers University
Whereas many children might have been horrified to open a cabinet and see cockroaches scurrying away, a young Dr. Caroline Palavicino-Maggio looked on in wonder. This was not an uncommon experience in the tiny Manhattan apartment that she lived in with her parents and siblings. What others might have found disgusting, she found inspiring. How were these creatures able to sense the light streaming in through the open cabinet doors, make the assessment that they were in danger, and decide to run away, all in a mere instant? This is Caroline’s first memory of questioning the underlying mechanisms of animal behavior – a line of inquiry that she did not yet understand was fundamentally neuroscientific in nature. Today, as an Assistant Professor at Harvard’s McLean Hospital, she still seeks to understand the neural mechanisms of behavior – specifically of aggression in female flies – and their relation to psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases.
Tragically, it was a traumatic event that turned Caroline’s early interest in behavior into a formal introduction to neuroscience. Caroline’s world was turned upside down when her older sister died by suicide. Caroline’s physical and emotional closeness to her sister made it all the more shocking. Left without any sort of note or physical clue left by her sister, she started looking for sources of explanation elsewhere. Some possible answers began to emerge when Caroline took her first psychology and neurobiology courses in college. Not only was she fascinated by the inner workings of the nervous system and their consequences for behavior, she found solace in the revelation that depression and other forms of mental illness are a product of one’s biology and thus out of one’s control. “After that course, I felt so much better…I no longer needed this note,” she reflects.
After graduating college and in search of a job, Caroline got her first exposure to scientific research. She scanned the “Help Wanted” sections of the newspapers and applied to anything that seemed remotely relevant to her Biopsychology degree. Noticing buzzwords like “PCR” that she recognized from her classes, she applied for and was hired as a joint research technician in two immunology labs at NYU that were working on vaccine development for malaria and AIDS. Thrown into the deep end of a new field, Caroline had to adapt and learn quickly. She rose to the challenge and enjoyed the experience of doing research. However, she still felt more drawn to the field of neuroscience than immunology, so after some time she moved to a new technician position at the New York Psychiatric Institute to do suicide research, analyzing post-mortem human brain tissue as well as tissue from animal models of depression. A few years in, after hearing so much about the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting from postdocs and students in her lab, she approached her PI about attending and presenting her work on neuronal density differences following various depression treatments in macaques. Her PI permitted her to submit an abstract but stipulated that Caroline would need to pay her own way and put someone else as first author on the poster. Despite these caveats, Caroline was excited by the opportunity. At the time, she could not have known how transformative that trip would prove to be.
On her flight to SfN in San Diego, Caroline happened to sit next to Dr. Nick Ingolglia, who was the Associate Dean of the New Jersey Medical School at Rutgers University at the time. After talking for the entire flight, Dr. Ingolglia encouraged her to apply to Rutgers’ graduate program; Caroline had clearly made a strong impression. At first, she scoffed that she couldn’t afford to take out any more student loans. But Dr. Ingolglia informed her for the first time that she could in fact get paid to get her PhD. Caroline was shocked – how had no one told her this before?! At that point, she had spent over five years as a technician in multiple research labs and had no notion of changing course; no one had ever pointed out to her that she could have been doing much of the same work while working towards a PhD. Still, Caroline was skeptical at her chances of being admitted to graduate programs and so only applied to the program at Rutgers - to which she was accepted.
Unsurprisingly, given her considerable skills and independence developed through her years as a research technician, Caroline excelled and flew through her PhD in just 4 years. When her initial research rotations through a dopamine and a gut lab didn’t fully satisfy her particular interests in neuropsychiatric disorders, she took the initiative to construct her own thesis project that combined what she’d learned through those rotations with her own interests. The research question she converged upon was: how do antipsychotic drugs - which purportedly target the brain’s emotional centers - have significant metabolic effects that often lead to weight gain? This was a particularly intriguing question for her because the weight gain side effects of antipsychotics are a major cause of patients halting their medication and subsequent psychotic relapse. She found that increased fructose metabolism and absorption in the gut with clozapine treatment – a common antipsychotic – contributes to antipsychotic-induced weight gain. This would suggest that adopting a low-fructose diet could counteract these side effects of the drug for patients. As a first-generation and Latina scientist, Caroline describes getting admitted to graduate school and ultimately obtaining her PhD as “monumental” and “generational”; her immense sense of accomplishment was shared by her immediate and extended families, by her son, and her whole neighborhood community. “My degree is not just for me, it represents a lot of other things.”
After completing her PhD, Caroline took time off to focus on her family – caregiving for her son and newborn daughter as well as her parents – and to contemplate what she wanted from a postdoc. She decided that she wanted to shift from working with mice to a simpler model organism with which she could attain larger sample sizes and greater reproducibility but still ask neuropsychiatric questions. This led her to Dr. Ed Kravitz’s lab at Harvard Medical School to work on aggression in flies. But while Ed’s (and the majority of the field’s) work had focused on male aggression, she became particularly interested in female aggression. Fortuitously, while at a “Drosophila crash course” at Cold Spring Harbor and during a fly behavior workshop led by Dr. Claire McKellar, she observed a specific genetic strain of flies that exhibited female-on-female aggression. After the course, she was able to take some of those flies back to Harvard, where she conducted extensive behavioral, cellular and molecular screens and identified a specific class of neurons called PC1 cells which stimulated aggressive behaviors but were only found in female flies. She has most recently been working on characterizing the full circuits in which these cells are embedded and the extent of their sexual dimorphism, as well as how these circuits for aggression are impacted in neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders.
Many aspects of Caroline’s transition from postdoc to an incoming Assistant Professor at Harvard’s McLean Hospital highlight how she is equally committed to outreach and advocacy work as to her impressive scientific accomplishments and aspirations. One of many examples of this commitment is reflected in her work with the Journal of Emerging Investigators, a journal specifically geared towards high school students. Noticing that contributors to the journal were lacking in diversity and tended to skew towards those whose parents were scientists, Caroline helped start a “mini-PhD” program to help disadvantaged or underrepresented minority students learn the scientific process and design and conduct their own mini-research projects that can be submitted to the journal. In addition to starting her own lab at McLean Hospital, Caroline is eager to also contribute to the community in other ways as well – such as by engaging in mental health awareness and cultural adaptation outreach programs with the broader Latinx community the hospital serves. She is also thinking deeply about the immense responsibility she will shoulder as a mentor for her lab members. She hopes to emulate the team of positive mentors that she has accumulated over the course of her training while making sure her mentees have the support and resources she lacked in her post-baccalaureate work.
Starting her own lab has been Caroline’s dream for a long time, even before she was able to publicly admit it. For a while, even through her postdoc, she was afraid to voice her aspiration out of self-consciousness and the fear that others would think her crazy or incapable. But with some helpful encouragement from her mentors as well as the metaphorical vote of confidence that came with her K99 MOSAIC award, she determined that this was, indeed, the path she wanted to take. For someone as curious, passionate, full of ideas, and committed to making a difference through both science and outreach as Caroline, it’s impossible to imagine anyone more fitting or deserving of such a role.
Listen to Megan K.’s full interview with Caroline on November 17, 2021 below!
