Dr. Malavika Murugan
Assistant Professor Emory University
Postdoctoral Fellow Princeton University
PhD in Neurobiology Duke University
Dr. Malavika Murugan found her love for neuroscience through a series of serendipitous decisions. Even though many of the turning points in her career make her feel as though she “stumbled” into this field, her clear passion for research was cemented by quality mentorship at every point in her journey. Now, as an Assistant Professor at Emory University, Malavika lets the lessons she learned from her research training and exceptional mentors guide her as she builds her own lab.
Malavika grew up in a traditional Indian community where the expectations for her career were limited to being a doctor or an engineer. It was only at the end of her bachelor’s degree in biotechnology and chemical engineering that she chose to use her elective credits on a neuroscience course. Intrigued by how much she enjoyed the topic, she sought opportunities to join a neuroscience research lab in her final semester before graduation and landed in the lab of the acclaimed Indian neurogeneticist, Dr. Obaid Siddiqi. With a special interest in Malavika’s training, Dr. Siddiqi took the time to teach her about his group’s work in drosophila larvae and invested in her growth as a scientist. His mentorship was a turning point for Malavika; despite her original plan to become an engineer, she began to see neuroscience as a viable career.
Although she applied to both engineering and neuroscience graduate programs, Malavika ultimately decided to pursue her PhD in neuroscience at Duke University–a choice supported by her mentor and family. As a new PhD student, all of her research rotations interested her–but none more than her rotation with Dr. Rich Mooney in his songbird lab. To Malavika, the songbird was strikingly different from the fly larvae she had worked with in India; their complex vocal learning trajectories make songbirds an elegant model system for studying the neural processes driving behavior. When Malavika joined the lab, Dr. Mooney challenged her with an exciting project: figure out how to use optogenetics to probe songbird neural circuitry. Optogenetics is a technique that allows us to manipulate neurons’ electrical signals using light. At the time, it was fairly new to neuroscience and had never been performed in a songbird. If she were to succeed, she would be the first to ever use the technique in this animal.
The reality of this project was much more frustrating than Malavika had first anticipated. After three years of graduate school and over 40 different attempts to successfully introduce a light-sensitive protein called channelrhodopsin in the birds, she had nothing but “negative data.” The repeated failure she faced was demoralizing, especially when she compared her data (or lack thereof) with the exciting projects of her lab mates. She decided to step back from the optogenetics project and pursue another experiment. Ultimately, the decision to take a respite from her project ended up being the best thing she could possibly have done.
To express channelrhodopsin in songbirds, Malavika was infecting their brains with an engineered virus containing custom “packaging.” This virus, containing the genetic instructions for making channelrhodopsin, allows for any infected neurons to produce channelrhodopsin itself. In the mouse brain, the infection-to-expression process takes about a few weeks. Unknown to Malavika, this process takes much longer in the songbird brain–on the order of months. So, when Malavika returned to her birds after leaving them for a few months, there it was! The channelrhodopsin was expressed by the neurons–and they were spiking in response to light! Malavika was so excited by her success that she immediately called Dr. Mooney. Although it was nearly midnight, he was so excited that he drove to the lab to confirm her success. In that moment–Malavika recalls–they were the only two people in the world who had ever witnessed such a thing. That memory remains a vital turning point in her life and dedication to a career in academia.
With such a challenging yet rewarding experience in her PhD, Malavika was eager to find a postdoctoral position. Although she loved working with songbirds in the Mooney lab, Malavika wanted to transition to a model organism with more direct options for genetic manipulation of the brain and behavior–like the mouse. When her husband landed a great job just minutes from the Princeton campus, Malavika decided to look into Princeton faculty and connected with Dr. Ilana Witten, who was just starting her lab studying reward behavior in mice. Despite the risk in joining a new lab, Malavika is profoundly grateful for the opportunity to watch a young woman scientist build her lab from the ground up. In her postdoctoral research, Malavika studied the circuits underlying rewarding social behavior. Specifically, she found clusters of neurons in the prefrontal cortex that project to the nucleus accumbens that are responsible for a phenomenon she termed “conjunctive social-spatial coding.” In this phenomenon, the mouse’s brain must identify and remember the spatial position of another mouse – be that friend or foe. For example, a mouse would want to remember the location of a rewarding social partner, like a mate, and avoid the location of an aggressive mouse. Using optogenetics, she could manipulate this behavior by stimulating the circuit to increase a mouse’s preference for a social location, or even prevent the mouse from forming a memory about that location at all.
Malavika started her own lab at Emory University in 2020, where she studies reward learning in mice– specifically how it depends on social context. Although starting her lab in the pandemic was challenging, Malavika found comfort in the fact that she was in good company – everyone was struggling to get supplies and stay productive under lockdowns and distancing requirements. Furthermore, her experience during Dr. Witten’s lab-building phase was invaluable in shaping her expectations.
In our interview with Malavika, she expands upon her most intense challenges. She was able to get through them, but not until she understood that she needed help, learned how to ask for it, and received the help she needed from her community of mentors, family, and friends. Malavika is immensely grateful for all kinds of support that she received throughout her career–from Dr. Siddiqi taking an interest in her as an undergraduate researcher, to Dr. Mooney celebrating her hard-won success during her PhD, to Dr. Witten supporting her relentlessly through her postdoctoral work and particularly difficult challenges. Malavika feels that their mentorship has shaped the scientist she has become. Now, in her own lab, she strives to mentor her students and lab members with the same compassion that she benefited so much from during her training. In doing so, she is cultivating that essential community within her lab and beyond: a community “that can catch you.”
Find out more about Malavika and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Malavika’s full interview with Meenakshi on January 13, 2023 below!
