Dr. Nuttida Rungratsameetaweemana
Provost's Research Fellow, Columbia University
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Salk Institute for Biological Studies
PhD in Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego
Dr. Nuttida Rungratsameetaweemana’s future in neuroscience was set in motion over the course of many hours spent visiting her father in the hospital. When she was 14, he sustained a severe spinal cord injury during a major flood in their home in Thailand and required a complicated surgery. A curious kid, Nuttida wanted to better understand his condition and what could be done to help him. She sought out secondhand textbooks on neuroscience and peppered her father’s neurosurgeon with many questions, to which he frequently responded with candor that he didn’t know the answer. “More research is needed,” he would repeatedly say. Thankfully the surgery ultimately proved successful, but Nuttida’s curiosity didn’t dissipate. Instead, she became convinced not only of the essential role that basic research had played in her dad’s recovery, but also that further research could help improve even more lives. Now, as a Provost’s Research Fellow at Columbia University, Nuttida is uncovering the neural and computational principles underlying complex cognitive functions, such as memory and decision-making.
Nuttida’s particular interest in memory was also born out of that time spent visiting her father during his surgery and recovery. She interacted with other neurosurgery patients over the course of her many hospital visits, and one in particular stands out in her memory. However, that particular patient never committed Nuttida to memory at all. They interacted many times, and yet, each occasion was like meeting for the first time because the patient did not remember her. Replaying a virtually identical conversation day after day was a striking experience for Nuttida, and this made her fascinated by the neuroscience of memory.
As her education progressed, Nuttida struggled to find opportunities to pursue her interests in neuroscience research in Thailand. So when it came time for college, she decided to move to the States and attended Middlebury College, a small liberal arts college in Vermont, studying neuroscience and math. Along the way, she sought out summer research internships that allowed her to gain research experience and pursue her interests in memory in the human brain. One of those internships was with Dr. John Serences at UC San Diego, and she enjoyed the experience enough that she returned there to pursue her PhD in Neurosciences.
Nuttida decided to study memory mechanisms in both healthy and patient populations by conducting her PhD research jointly with Dr. John Serences – who studies sensory perception and decision-making in healthy human populations – and with Dr. Larry Squire, a well-known memory researcher who works extensively with memory-impaired populations. Her goal was to design a series of tasks that could be administered to both populations and, when combined with functional neuroimaging, could help disentangle the memory-dependent versus memory-independent aspects of decision-making. Interestingly, she found that on the majority of these cognitive tests, the memory-impaired patients (with bilateral lesions to their medial temporal lobes) performed nearly or just as well as the healthy control subjects. This raised the possibility that perhaps the classic memory circuitry (medial temporal lobes, including the hippocampus) wasn’t required for many of these tasks because the information needed to complete them was already being computed at “early” stages of sensory processing. Put another way, she wondered whether sensory areas of the brain are doing more than traditional sensory encoding.
Nuttida was just beginning to test this hypothesis at the end of her PhD with a series of functional neuroimaging studies when the pandemic hit, and all human subject research ground to an abrupt halt. It was also around this time that she transitioned into a postdoctoral position with Dr. Terry Sejnowski at the Salk Institute to focus on computational modeling. She had already gained a keen interest in taking a complementary, computational approach to her experimental studies from her PhD. Although the pandemic was disastrous for human neuroscience research, it was well suited to modeling work, so this choice of a postdoc proved fortuitous. Nuttida focused her efforts on developing an artificial neural network to do the same tasks she had given to her human subjects. Her goal was to better understand what possible computations might be taking place “under the hood” that would allow both healthy and memory-impaired populations to perform so well.
Now, Nuttida is continuing and expanding upon this line of work as a Provost’s Research Fellow in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University. This is a position created through Columbia’s Inclusive Faculty Pathways Initiative that allows her to begin pursuing her own, independent research program as an early career scientist. Her lab is currently working on developing a hierarchical model that more closely resembles the architecture of an actual brain – one in which sensory circuits sit at lower levels of the hierarchy but may already be performing elaborate computations, as Nuttida hypothesizes. She is also collaborating with a team of clinicians led by Dr. Ueli Rutishauser at Cedars Sinai Medical Center (a relationship she began at the end of her postdoc) to collect electrocorticography (ECoG) and single-unit data from epilepsy patients performing her same memory and decision-making tasks. Through this effort, she is able to take a closer look at what’s actually happening in memory- and sensory-related parts of the human brain during completion of these tasks, even at the level of individual neurons. In the future, she is excited at the prospect of undertaking further collaborations to adapt her tasks to other mammals, such as non-human primates and rodents, and thus take a comparative approach to understanding how memory and sensory circuitry is used by different brains to perform complex tasks.
Throughout her career, Nuttida has demonstrated remarkable resolve towards accomplishing her long-standing goal of uncovering unknown mechanisms of memory and other aspects of cognition in the human brain. However, the path through did not always seem so clear. Particularly when she was young and still considering possible careers, she struggled to find role models who demonstrated that a career in neuroscience research was possible for a young woman from Thailand. She credits her parents for being open-minded and supporting a seemingly uncertain career path, as well as many mentors along the way who helped and encouraged her. Nonetheless, she is acutely aware of the profound significance of representation in science and has engaged in extensive outreach efforts toward that end, such as organizing and conducting neuroscience “boot camps” for middle and high schoolers in Thailand. Currently, she is especially excited about participating in an initiative called Letters to a Pre-Scientist, a program that matches young students interested in STEM with scientist pen-pals. She reflects upon being a kid in Thailand and desperately wanting to communicate with a “real scientist” to learn more about them and their work. Now, as a “real scientist” herself, she hopes to make some other young students’ wishes come true. Perhaps, as her father's neurosurgeon once did, she will answer some of their questions with "more research is needed", inspiring them to become researchers themselves. Certainly 14-year-old Nuttida would have been proud to know that she would someday be at the forefront of memory research, not only asking but also answering questions about the brain.
Find out more about Nuttida and her research here.
Listen to Megan’s full interview with Nuttida on October 2, 2023 below!
