Dr. Jyoti Mishra
Associate Professor University of California, San Diego
Postdoctoral Researcher University of California, San Francisco
PhD University of California, San Diego
As a child, Dr. Jyoti Mishra regularly bore witness to the real-life impacts of brain medicine. Because her father was an interventional neuroradiologist in India, her family lived on a hospital campus and patients often visited their home. They became a salient part of Jyoti’s life, and she often witnessed their near-miraculous recoveries with her own eyes. She was enamored with the incredible powers of the brain and knew early on that she wanted to leverage those powers to improve people’s lives. Now, as an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at UC San Diego, she is doing just that by conducting cutting-edge research in neurotechnology for the diagnosis and treatment of mental health disorders.
Although Jyoti knew she was interested in the brain, the path by which she could achieve her goals wasn’t immediately clear. For instance, undergraduate majors in neuroscience didn’t exist in India at the time. She considered a medical career and even entered medical school after high school, but she left after just one month. Finding herself constantly asking why things were the way they were, which was not the focus of the medical school education, she realized she might be better suited for a scientific career. She thus went on to earn her Bachelor’s in Science degree from Delhi University and Master’s degree at the National Center for Biological Sciences in India, where she first delved into computational modeling of neuronal circuits. But through her own reading and gaining further exposure to the wider field, she found that the area of cognitive neuroscience excited her the most. Thus, she decided to pursue a PhD in this field.
This goal brought Jyoti to the United States for the first time to study computational biology at UC San Diego. While there, she became interested in multisensory integration and multisensory illusions: for instance, how a single flash (visual) concurrent with two sounds (auditory) played in quick succession can create the illusion of a nonexistent second flash. Working with Drs. Steven Hillyard and Terry Sejnowski, Jyoti recorded electrical neural activity in humans during this type of illusion using electroencephalography (EEG) and found that it was associated with rapid communication between auditory and visual cortical areas. This was just one of many projects that Jyoti completed during her PhD. Despite her prolificity, Jyoti experienced the “post-PhD blues” and considered many possible career paths for her next step. Ultimately, she concluded that she wanted to pursue a career in science, but not one in “basic science” – she wanted to apply her science toward improving mental health. Having seen how her father’s patients’ lives were transformed via targeted interventions, she felt passionately about applying her knowledge towards a similar end.
With these clear goals in mind, Jyoti took an unusual next step and concocted her own joint postdoctoral position in industry and in academia - as a senior scientist at Posit Science Corporation and a postdoc in the department of neurology at UCSF. But she didn’t stop there; Jyoti also decided to spend one year as a clinical research fellow at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi, India, where she worked with a psychiatrist to bring cognitive rehabilitation technology that she had been working on in industry to her own community. This technology was meant to improve attention and cognition in kids with ADHD. Her unique menagerie of post-doctoral experiences satisfied Jyoti’s cravings to do data-driven science and take what she learned directly to the clinic and to the public. It also gave her a unique perspective on the differences between industry and academia, such as the distinct emphases on return on investment (ROI) in industry versus building intellectual capital in academia. The latter resonated with her more, and so, in the end, she chose academia.
In 2017, Jyoti moved back to UC San Diego, this time as a faculty member. She co-founded the Neural Engineering And Translation labs (NEATLabs) with her husband, Dr. Dhakshin Ramanathan, with the overarching goal of developing and evaluating new neuroscientific tools and technologies that can advance mental health through assessments and interventions. The combined labs have the unique advantage of taking a cross-species, mechanistic approach; she specializes in human work while her husband specializes in animal work, and they co-advise many of their trainees together.
Even amidst all the successes in Jyoti’s career, she has also experienced a number of challenging professional and life transitions. She notes that academia is, in many ways, a nomadic career, often requiring one to move homes multiple times in the course of training. At each of those transitions, there may be friends, family, and communities that get left behind. For Jyoti, her transition from India to the US to pursue her PhD was particularly challenging – leaving her family and getting used to American culture and language. To face the stress and depression that this transition triggered, Jyoti found meditation and breathing practices to be transformative, and these continue to be an active presence in her life to this day. The transition to parenthood was also a significant one, and for this and all of the transitions she has encountered through life, having a strong support network – both personal and professional – was crucial.
Jyoti loves being part of her NEATLabs team. She feels that she is learning more from them than they are from her (though they may disagree), and this, more than anything else, is what keeps her in academia. She has also embraced her role as a mentor, having mentored almost 200 individuals (and more than 100 women) at the time of this interview. She believes at her core that while every person has their own strengths and weaknesses, everyone is capable of contributing to good science if they are guided and supported by a knowledgeable team. She takes immense pleasure in watching her trainees grow from when they first approach her as interested novices to when they move on to their next steps rich with research expertise.
Throughout her career, Jyoti has demonstrated an impressive ability to center her big-picture priorities – such as having an impact on public health – in all of her career transitions, even when that required charting her own path. Through this journey, Jyoti has gained a remarkable breadth of expertise and experiences – in academia, in industry, in the clinic, and now even as a children’s book author of The Little Brain. It should come as no surprise that this children’s story teaches the beauty of lifelong learning and exploration – values that Jyoti herself personifies.
Find out more about Jyoti and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Meenakshi’s full interview with Jyoti on April 18th, 2023 below!
