Dr. Anne Urai
Assistant Professor Leiden University
Postdoctoral Fellow Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
PhD University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf
Dr. Anne Urai discovered her interest in the brain almost entirely by chance. Her love of science, maths, languages and philosophy in high school, and reluctance to choose between them, lead her to pursue a dual major degree in science and humanities as an undergraduate. As a first year at University College Utrecht, Anne found herself placed in cognitive neuroscience and philosophy classes — a fortunate coincidence that would profoundly shape her career in the years that followed. Now an Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at Leiden University in the Netherlands, Anne reflects that “...if they had randomly assigned me to chemistry and Spanish, I would be doing something very different!” In another life, she thinks she could have enjoyed building on her interest in languages and becoming an interpreter for the EU.
Although her classes taught Anne very little about the brain in high school, studying neuroscience as an undergraduate captured her imagination. Anne was fascinated by the idea that a biological organ can give rise to the richness and complexity of thoughts, feelings, internal states, and disorders. She also found she enjoyed considering both scientific and philosophical approaches to understanding these phenomena. “Scientists work under all these assumptions and methods and ways of approaching things that have been under scrutiny by philosophers for a long time. I think having a little bit of a background in the philosophy of science is very valuable”. Anne continued to combine these interests during her dual Master’s degrees in brain and mind science at UCL and Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. During her time at these institutions, Anne joined labs studying subjective experience and consciousness, topics she found fascinating to think about and discuss. However, she wasn't satisfied with how some aspects of these topics remained intangible and therefore challenging to study rigorously. And so, during her PhD in the lab of Dr. Tobias Donner, she moved away from these seemingly ungraspable questions and towards the “more approachable” topics of learning and decision-making.
Her PhD was initially focused on perceptual learning, particularly how past experience influences perceptual processes. For example, “... if you’re training to be a radiologist in a hospital and you judge images like X-rays then over the years your visual system becomes excellent at spotting minute details that to [a less experience person] might not be visible at all”. To investigate how experience shapes perception, Anne trained human participants on a visual task in which they were presented with groups of moving dots. On each trial, participants had to report whether one group of moving dots had more or less ‘motion coherence’ (i.e were moving in the same direction) than a ‘reference’ group of dots. The difficulty of this judgement varied between trials and participants made faster and more accurate choices when more sensory evidence was available.
However, Anne encountered some difficulties in the early stages of this project. Due to the small number of participants in her study, and with each participant only representing a single data point in her learning dataset, many of her hypotheses were difficult to test. Fortunately, she had also collected a large amount of data about the size of participants' pupils during the task. Digging further into this pupillometry data, Anne discovered that the size of people’s pupils could be linked to their uncertainty about the direction of movements of the dots using a statistical model. She found there was an inverse relationship between certainty and pupil size: the less certain people were, the bigger their pupil. This pupil response was also predictive of their subsequent action: when a choice was followed by a large pupil response, participants were less likely to repeat their last choice and vice versa. These results indicated that participants’ uncertainty was driving a change in their state of arousal, reflected in their pupil size, which was shaping their subsequent choice behavior. Anne spent the rest of her PhD exploring the link between pupil size, arousal, and this model of “learning under uncertainty”.
Halfway through her PhD, Anne began thinking about what she wanted to do next. She made a list of academics doing interesting research — spanning many topics, locations, techniques, and model organisms — and set about trying to meet each of them. One of the people she reached out to was Dr. Anne Churchland, a group leader at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in New York. The Churchland lab studies decision-making in mice using invasive neural recordings. Coming from a background in human research, Anne was excited by the insight that rodent studies like the ones Dr. Churchland was running could provide into the biological signals underpinning complex behavior.
One project in the Churchland lab that Anne was particularly excited by, and ultimately spent the majority of her postdoc working on, was part of the International Brain Lab (IBL) collaboration. The premise of this collaboration, which is still ongoing today, is to explore the neural basis of decision-making using a standardized mouse behavioral task. In this task, mice are presented with visual gratings of varying contrast on either the right or left-hand side of a small screen. They are required to report the location of each grating by spinning a small wheel left or right, and receive a reward when they choose correctly. Interestingly, this task has many parallels with the dot task of Anne’s PhD — albeit in mice, not humans — as it probes the mouse’s ability to make decisions in the face of differing amounts of sensory evidence. By setting up the same task in multiple labs around the world, the IBL collaboration sought to generate a large, replicable, and freely-available dataset of neural activity in different regions of the mouse brain during decision-making and reward-motivated behavior. This was very different to a normal postdoc project, as it involved a global consortium of experimental and theoretical researchers working together towards a common aim. Having conducted her PhD at a time when replicability was a major problem in psychology research, Anne was thrilled to be part of a project that represented a more open and standardized way of doing science.
It turns out, however, that setting up the same behavioral task in multiple labs around the world isn’t particularly straightforward. Anne recalls facing lots of challenges along the way: equipment not being available in different countries, figuring out how to train and care for mice in a consistent way, accounting for temperature and environmental difference etc. She also notes that one of the most interesting aspects of this project was learning how to work with such a large group of researchers at once. “We had a lot of discussions, for instance, about how we assign credit to everyone who was involved in a project and how we take this into account when we decide the authorship on papers… [making] sure everyone in the project knows what is expected and has a nice combination between freedom to work on their own interests versus contributing to the general goal of the collaboration”. Eventually, after a lot of discussion, testing, and refinement, they were able to develop and publish a full set of guidelines for setting up and implementing the IBL experiment. Anne hopes that the success of this project and others like it will spur people to work together on more big, open-science projects in future.
Anne describes the end of her postdoc in the Churchland lab as ”chaotic.” New York was hit hard by COVID in the spring of 2020 and the lab was forced to stop all experimental work. It was in the midst of this that Anne saw an advertisement for an assistant professorship at Leiden University in the Netherlands. With a lot of time on her hands and no experiments to run, she decided to apply and was ultimately offered the position — a remarkable achievement given she only completed her PhD 2 years earlier.
Moving to a new city in the middle of a pandemic was challenging. While everything being online made it easier to balance setting up a lab with caring for her pandemic-born baby, Anne admits that she found it difficult to find her footing initially as she wasn’t able to meet people. As of this year, however, she feels life is starting to return to normal and she can now turn her sights to her goals for the lab for the next few years. Anne’s lab, the Cognitive, Computational and Systems Neuroscience (CoCoSys) lab, will be investigating how the brain uses sensory information to drive decision-making and how this varies with experience and internal states. She’s particularly interested in looking at the effect of aging on the brain and behaviour, and how translational, cross-species work in both rodents and humans can be used to address this.
In addition to her experimental work, Anne is also a passionate climate change awareness advocate. In recent years, she’s collaborated with other researchers to raise awareness about how neuroscientists can relate and respond to the climate crisis. She’s contributed to several publications encouraging academics to consider reducing unnecessary academic travel, manage emissions caused by wet lab work (e.g single use plastics), and think about the energy used during computational work. She’s also urging neuroscientists to consider all the different roles they play outside of science; as citizens, family members, and friends. “It’s important to not limit yourself to just addressing your own footprint and stopping there, but to really create this kind of social domino effect — multiplying your actions and making it a social project.”
Anne takes comfort in the fact that she has seen major changes in science culture in just a few years. For instance, open science and diversity are much bigger parts of the scientific discourse than they were even 10 years ago. This significant shift in perspective, in addition to the emergence of large-scale collaborative endeavors like the IBL, demonstrate that neuroscientists are capable of coming together as a field to address big issues. Anne hopes that we’ll see a similar level of attention and action from the neuroscience community towards combating the climate crisis in the coming years, and is going to keep doing her part to get us there. From helping us understand how our brains make decisions, to informing us about how to take effective actions against climate change — Anne is helping people and scientists alike learn how to make good decisions both for themselves and for the planet.
Find out more about Anne and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Caitlin’s full interview with Anne on March 8th, 2022 below!
