Dr. Mary Kay Lobo
Professor University of Maryland, Baltimore
Postdoctoral Researcher Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
PhD University of California, Los Angeles
When she was around seven or eight years old, Dr. Mary Kay Lobo sat rapt in front of the television learning about DNA from one of her favorite shows, NOVA on PBS. While the show inspired in her a love for all things science, Mary Kay remembers being particularly taken with the idea that a combination of molecules like DNA could act as a blueprint for life as we know it. However, even throughout high school, she never considered that she could become a scientist herself—that sounded far too intimidating. Little did she realize that her childhood fascination with DNA would mature into a love for molecular biology and propel her into a career studying the brain. Today, Mary Kay is a professor in the Neurobiology Department at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, where her lab studies the basal ganglia and the molecular mechanisms underlying its role in motivation and repetitive behaviors.
After a brief stint studying geology and then a phase of considering a future as a veterinarian, Mary Kay was assigned to work in Dr. Michael Levine’s neuroscience lab as part of a summer research program at UCLA. The lab was studying the basal ganglia, and this experience clearly left an indelible impression on Mary Kay, as she has worked on the basal ganglia ever since! She continued working in the Levine lab throughout her undergraduate years and then for a couple years as a technician after graduating. Her first project involved histological examination of glutamate receptor subunit expression during development, but eventually Mary Kay got to dip her toes into the waters of molecular biology, a field that had held excitement for her ever since watching those NOVA episodes long ago. A large portion of the lab was focused on electrophysiology, and there was a collective interest in doing single-cell RT-qPCR to look at gene expression in the specific cells being recorded from. Mary Kay found this project thrilling, and she knew that she wanted to continue doing molecular neuroscience in the future.
Ultimately, Mary Kay chose to stay at UCLA for graduate school. Not only was the school at the forefront of neurogenetics, but it also had a diverse student body in which Mary Kay felt comfortable. As it happened, her timing in starting in UCLA’s neuroscience program was perfect, as Dr. William Yang was just starting his lab there. The Yang lab was studying the basal ganglia like the Levine lab, but with a more cellular/molecular focus—a perfect fit for Mary Kay. She began a project doing a basic profiling of the two main neuronal subtypes in the striatum. Using transgenic mouse lines expressing green fluorescent protein (GFP) in the populations of interest, Mary Kay learned how to dissociate neurons, sort them for GFP fluorescence, and perform microarrays—a precursor method to RNA sequencing—to explore their gene expression. While she followed up on the biological importance of some of the genes that she had found to be enriched in striatal subpopulations, looking back, she is perhaps most proud of the foundational transcriptomics experiments themselves. The Yang lab went on to pursue multiple projects based on Mary Kay’s microarray dataset, and it was rewarding for her to see how her own results directed the lab’s work in the years that followed.
At the end of graduate school, Mary Kay knew that she wanted to continue in the realm of cellular and molecular neuroscience but shift into looking at addiction and motivation. The lab at the forefront of this type of work was Dr. Eric Nestler’s lab, so when she received a postdoc offer from Eric, it was an easy yes. Eric’s lab was then at UT Southwestern in Dallas, although the lab would soon move to Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine in New York. Coincidentally, around the time she joined the lab, Eric received some of the same GFP-expressing transgenic mice that Mary Kay had worked on during graduate school. Given her experience, she seemed like the perfect person to spearhead a project on how different populations of striatal neurons are involved in addiction. Again, timing was on Mary Kay’s side, this time in the form of a serendipitous collaboration. Far away at Stanford, Dr. Karl Diesseroth was working on developing a new technique—optogenetics—which would take the world of neuroscience by storm. Mary Kay had been communicating with Karl’s lab about an entirely different topic, but Karl ended up inviting Mary Kay to his lab to learn optogenetics, a technique that allows scientists to activate neurons by shining a particular wavelength of light on them. Mary Kay set up the technique in the Nestler lab and used it to make an important discovery about striatal dopamine neurons. Classically, the field thinks of striatal D1 and D2 neurons operating in a push-and-pull opposition relationship that drives coordinated movement. Mary Kay found that activating D1 neurons increases cocaine-mediated addictive behavior while activating D2 neurons reduces the pleasure-seeking behavior. Thus, Mary Kay’s discovery demonstrated that the classical view of D1 and D2 neurons acting in opposition was not only true in the context of coordinated movement, but could also be expanded to regulation of addictive behavior.
As she wrapped up her postdoc, Mary Kay felt confident that she was ready to forge a new path as an independent investigator. This was not a self-assuredness that she had felt throughout her journey; it had been nurtured in her by supportive mentors who saw her potential when she did not see it herself. Ultimately, Mary Kay joined the faculty at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore. Her lab built upon her previous work on neuronal subtypes in the striatum, but she branched out to also study areas downstream of the striatum (e.g., the ventral pallidum) and behavioral paradigms other than addiction (e.g., stress). Her lab has blossomed in the years since, expanding into areas even Mary Kay never could have foreseen. One such surprise has been a project on the role of mitochondria in synaptic plasticity, which started when the National Institute on Drug Abuse announced an interest in funding work on metabolism at the same time that Mary Kay’s lab found metabolism-related gene expression altered in one of their datasets. She finds this particularly ironic, as mitochondria had been her least favorite organelle (too many metabolic pathways to memorize in biology class)! But sometimes science works in mysterious ways, and Mary Kay has always been up for the adventure of following the data to unexpected discoveries.
In addition to running her lab, Mary Kay co-founded and has acted as chair of a diversity committee at University of Maryland. It began as a committee associated with the graduate program, but she has overseen its expansion to serve the school’s entire neuroscience institute. While DEI work is never finished, the IDEAS (Inclusivity, Diversity,Equity, and Anti-Racism in Science) committee has made important strides in changing recruitment practices, fostering open discussions about racism, and implementing bias training. Many DEI efforts born in 2020 have faded with time, but with Mary Kay’s guidance and leadership, the IDEAS committee is still going strong.
Mary Kay’s motivation to help create and run this diversity committee stems from a deep recognition that feeling part of a community can make a world of difference. Looking back, she remembers that as an undergraduate, she did a lot of work shadowing a female graduate student and working in UCLA’s histology core, which was staffed with several women scientists. It was an environment in which she felt entirely comfortable, and it was her first glimpse of a potential future for herself as a scientist. She hopes that, with increased diversity among the students and faculty at the University of Maryland, others can find that type of representation and sense of belonging. No doubt Mary Kay is now a role model for trainees much like her younger self, and the supportive environment she has worked to create will similarly help them to envision themselves as future scientists.
Find out more about Mary Kay and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Rianne’s full interview with Mary Kay on October 17th, 2023 below!
