Dr. Ana Marija Jakšić
Principal Investigator École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland
Postdoctoral Fellow Cornell University, New York
PhD in Population Genetics Veterinary Medicine of Vienna, Austria
While Dr. Ana Marija Jakšić didn’t find her way to neuroscience until she was well into her PhD, her general interest in science emerged when she was very young. As an elementary school student, she enrolled in an extracurricular class on astronomy, and her first “spark” for science was lit. Although she eventually gravitated away from contemplating major questions about the universe towards a more earthbound level of inquiry, she has continued to tackle big, astronomically bold questions. Now, as an ELISIR Scholar and Group Leader at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), her research in experimental evolutionary neurobiology is expanding our understanding of biological variability and the evolutionary limits of cognitive capabilities.
In spite of her childhood interest in science, Ana Marija enrolled in a vocational high school in Zagreb, Croatia that specialized in economics. The decision was encouraged by Ana Marija’s parents, who envisioned that Ana Marija would one day run their family business. Unfortunately, she hated it! Deciding to pivot, she thought about going to university to study veterinary science or some other biological field, but from her vocational economics training, she lacked the necessary qualifications. Inspired by her uncle who ran a dairy farm, she decided that she would instead pursue farming as an alternate career that would blend her interest in animals with her economics training. She thus enrolled at the University of Zagreb and began a course in Animal Science. The more she learned, the more she realized that most modern farming is based on quantitative and population genetics, and she was fascinated by it.
As she continued on with a Masters degree in Animal Genetics and Breeding at the University of Zagreb, one of her professors commented on how talented she was in this field and suggested she consider getting a PhD. Initially she had no interest; why would she get a PhD if she wanted to be a farmer?! However, as she started to get involved in more research projects in that professor’s lab as well as others and really enjoyed them, she reconsidered and ultimately changed her mind.
Ana Marija thus began her PhD at the Institute of Population Genetics within the school of Veterinary Medicine in Vienna, Austria, working in the lab of Dr. Christian Schlötterer. She embarked upon a project to investigate evolutionary adaptation to different temperature conditions in fruit flies. To her surprise, one organ jumped out as having evolved dramatically in the face of temperature change: the brain. In particular, she found that dopaminergic neurons were very important for temperature adaptation in flies, such that many of their genes were up- and down-regulated in response to lower and higher temperature climates, respectively. This was her first, unplanned foray into neuroscience, and she was enthralled by it. She had never even taken a single neuroscience class in her life, and now she wanted to know more.
Upon finishing her PhD, Ana Marija decided to continue studying neurobiology from an evolutionary genetics perspective for her postdoc. She moved to the US to join the lab of Dr. Andy Clark at Cornell University and study variability in dopaminergic signaling across different fly genotypes. However, not long after starting this new position, someone sent her the application for the EPFL Life Sciences Independent Research (ELISIR) program, which provides the opportunity and funding for exceptional PhD graduates to start their own labs right away. Ana Marija already held a number of ambitious project ideas in the back of her mind for her potential future as a PI; not having to wait to pursue those ideas but rather start them right away was too enticing a possibility to ignore. She applied, and she got it! She describes the following transition as “abrupt, chaotic, but super exciting.” She had to cut her postdoc short, move back to Europe, and start a lab from scratch…and all at the beginning of 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic began to wreak havoc. Nonetheless, she was thrilled to realize her dream of pursuing the ambitious projects that she pitched in her successful ELISIR application.
Ana Marija’s dream, which is now the major focus of her laboratory, was to use experimental evolution to try and evolve higher cognitive capability in flies. This is even more ambitious and challenging than it sounds. First, “cognition” has to be carefully and operationally defined in a way that can be measured in flies. Secondly, in order to select for it evolutionarily speaking, it needs to be screened for in a high-throughput way, continuously across many generations and many individuals. In practice, that means her lab aims to screen 1500 flies every single day! This is an immense challenge in and of itself, and thus, a major branch of her lab is focused on the engineering problem of using robots to drive an automated phenotypic screening process. Ana Marija hopes that this work will reveal fundamental, biological implementations of higher cognitive abilities. She envisions that understanding these evolutionary processes could inform the design of future artificial intelligence technologies. Another branch of Ana Marija’s lab is addressing a very different set of questions and problems, but still under the umbrella of evolutionary biology: genetic variability and adaptive fitness in coral. By understanding what genetic variations allow some corals to be more resilient than others in the face of climate change, they are hoping to contribute to coral conservation efforts. This provides an exciting avenue for putting their evolutionary genomics expertise towards increasing sustainability and combating climate change.
From astronomy, to economics, to farming, to genetics, and finally to evolutionary neurobiology, Ana Marija’s bold innovativeness and creativity have propelled her through a unique educational journey. As a PI, she continues to push her own boundaries – by venturing into additional fields like engineering and conservation biology – as well as the fundamental biological boundaries of evolved cognition in fruit flies. Clearly Ana Marija is just getting started, and undoubtedly she and her lab’s work will continue to evolve and yield exciting results.
Find out more about Ana Marija and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Margarida’s full interview with Ana Marija on December 14, 2022 below!
