Dr. Karine Fénelon
Assistant Professor of Biology University of Massachussetts, Amherst
Postdoctoral Fellow Columbia University
PhD Universite de Montreal
Growing up in Montreal, Canada, to parents of Haitian descent, Dr. Karine Fénelon was taught from an early age that, as a Black woman, she would need to work hard and stay determined to succeed. Throughout the inevitable ups and downs of the academic path, Karine kept this advice close to heart, persevering and growing as a scientist. Now, as an Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Karine produces impactful translational research on the neural circuits underlying sensorimotor gating, and acts as a caring and supportive mentor and advocate for Black academics in STEM.
Karine’s curiosity about the brain began in the periphery. As an undergraduate at McGill University, she was captivated by Dr. Jacopo Mortola’s respiratory physiology course. She joined his lab the following summer and studied the mechanisms underlying respiration in a rat model of hypoxia. This research was challenging, but Karine rose to those challenges and earned her first first-author publication. Importantly, this work ignited a curiosity in Karine to explore how peripheral systems are controlled. This led her to pursue a master’s degree in biology and biophysics at Universite de Sherbrooke under the mentorship of Dr. Paul C. Pape, where she studied excitation and contraction mechanisms of muscles using frog skeletal muscle fibers. Throughout her master’s studies, Karine’s curiosity about the upstream command center of muscles grew, which ultimately brought her to the brain.
As a doctoral student at the Universite de Montreal, Karine investigated how muscles are controlled by brainstem neurons. Using lampreys – an ancient species of fish with an eel-like body and jawless disc-shaped mouth – as a model organism, Karine recorded locomotor activity and asked how neurons in the brainstem control muscles during swimming. Combining sharp electrode intracellular electrophysiology and calcium imaging, she discovered the intrinsic properties of brainstem neurons that are important for sending information down the spinal cord to the muscles. She found that the action of glutamate and calcium were responsible for neuron-muscle communication in swimming. By the end of her doctoral studies, Karine excitedly felt like she understood how muscles worked. But what controls these cells?
In her journey upstream from muscles to the brain, Karine moved to the United States where she joined the lab of Dr. Amy McDermott at the Columbia University Medical Center in New York City as a postdoc. Her postdoctoral work introduced Karine to patch clamp electrophysiology. As opposed to sharp electrode electrophysiology, which she used in her PhD work, patching allows the cell membrane to be more tightly controlled by the experimenter and provides an accurate readout of the electrical properties of a single cell or ion channel. Karine was initially assigned a project to conduct in vitro electrophysiological analyses in preparations of the rat spinal cord with the dorsal roots attached to study the neural mechanisms of pain. However, due to changes in the funding landscape, the McDermott laboratory developed a collaboration with the neighboring lab of Dr. Joseph Gogos who was seeking an electrophysiologist to explore the brain mechanisms underlying schizophrenia, and she excitedly joined their team.
Karine’s time in the Gogos lab was her first exposure to investigating the mechanisms underlying neuropsychiatric disorders, bringing about a welcome and enlightening shift in perspective. The Gogos lab used the Df(16)A+/- mouse line – a model of human 22q11 microdeletion syndrome that recapitulates core symptoms of schizophrenia. Karine hypothesized that the connection between the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex, critical for working memory, was impaired in this mouse model. Using a combination of in vitro electrophysiology and optogenetics, Karine discovered that synaptic connections were indeed disrupted between the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex of Df(16)A+/- mice, and that the neurons in both regions had electrophysiological and plasticity abnormalities.
While familiarizing herself with the literature on psychiatric disorders for her shift to the Gogos lab, Karine came across an idea that was career-changing: the brainstem contains key neurons that control the startle response, which is a component of sensorimotor gating, a process important for filtering out irrelevant information. Interestingly, this phenomenon is impaired in schizophrenia. So, when it came time to start her own lab at UMass Amherst, Karine set out to apply her knowledge of the brainstem from her doctoral research in lampreys and her expertise in electrophysiology to studies relevant to psychiatric disorders in mouse models.
Sensorimotor gating can be studied by evaluating prepulse inhibition of the startle reflex - a phenomenon where a weaker stimulus (prepulse) attenuates how an organism reacts to a subsequent stronger and typically startle reflex-eliciting stimulus. This can be seen in nearly all animals, from worms to humans, in response to sensory stimulation such as sounds, touch, or light. Interestingly, prepulse inhibition is disrupted in Df(16)A+/- mice. While we know deficits in sensorimotor gating are common in many neuropsychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, the basic circuit underlying this process is unclear. Understanding the circuit is critical for developing treatments for core symptoms of neuropsychiatric disorders. Fittingly, the Fénelon lab has invested time in carefully examining the circuit involved in the process of healthy prepulse inhibition in wild-type mice. Using a combination of tract tracing, electrophysiology, in situ hybridization, and optogenetics the lab discovered that glutamatergic amygdala to brainstem projections function to reduce prepulse inhibition and induce the startle response. They accomplish this by activating inhibitory glycinergic neurons within the brainstem. Thinking toward the future, Karine is hoping to continue exploring upstream players that activate the amygdala and contribute to sensorimotor gating.
Outside of work, Karine spends quality time with her family. They often travel to Canada and Morocco to visit their relatives. Her two children play sports – basketball and soccer. While she never imagined herself being an involved “sports mom”, she has found joy in attending her children’s games, watching them thrive and grow.
Karine has also invested time into working as a mentor and community leader. After the murder of George Floyd, with increasing tensions within UMass and beyond, Karine began to feel discouraged, sad, and angry. She came to find that seeking a community where she could share, connect, and revive was key. Karine worked with other Black women in academia across fields to create an anti-racism series for faculty. She was encouraged to see her colleagues open themselves up to engaging with and learning from this series. Karine actively participated in the UMass Black PIs in STEM group, and serves as the liaison between the faculty and student groups. Karine finds hope in seeing the communities she has built both in and outside of her lab overcome obstacles, support each other, and celebrate each other’s successes. She believes that mentoring never ends, and that representation truly matters at all stages of your education and career.
Find out more about Karine and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Nancy’s full interview with Karine on December 14th, 2023 below!
