Dr. Erin Hecht
Assistant Professor Harvard University
Postdoctoral fellow Emory University/Georgia State University
PhD Emory University
Although Dr. Erin Hecht has always taken a particular interest in the natural world, it didn’t occur to her to become a scientist until she read Carl Sagan’s Contact as a teenager. Immersed in the story, she got her first taste of what it might feel like to make a big scientific discovery as she adopted the perspective of the book’s female protagonist. Today, Erin is the protagonist of her own story of scientific discovery, studying species ranging from dogs to humans in order to understand how brains evolve and give rise to new behaviors.
Inspired by the main character in Contact, Erin initially aspired to be a physicist. But as an undergraduate physics major at UC San Diego, a work-study assignment led her to a neuroscience research lab where she studied social perception and cognition in children. She used electroencephalography (EEG) to non-invasively record electrical signals emanating from different parts of participants’ brains while they performed an action, or watched another person mirroring the same action. Erin fell in love with this research. She recalls feeling amazed: “I could stick this thing [an EEG cap] on somebody’s head and see what their brain was doing in real-time, and I could come up with a hypothesis I wanted to test, and within the span of a few weeks, actually test it. It made science seem more tangible and accessible”. From there, she switched from physics to neuroscience. She still wasn’t sure how she would be able to earn a living long-term, but when she learned that many neuroscience graduate programs provide a stipend, she decided to give it a shot.
As Erin entered the Neuroscience graduate program at Emory University, she was still thinking about her undergraduate research on social cognition and its connection to so-called “mirror neurons”. Initially described in macaque monkeys, mirror neurons are cells that are activated by the performance of a particular action, regardless of who (self or other) is performing that action. Erin had read about differences in mirror neurons among primate species, and she became interested in how the mirror neuron system might have specially evolved in humans to support their sophisticated social cognition and behaviors. Erin decided to join the lab of Dr. Lisa Parr to study social cognition in our most closely related primate relatives – chimpanzees – in order to better understand human-specific modifications to the mirror neuron system. To study brain activity in chimpanzees and to make direct comparisons to humans, she used an imaging method known as FDG-PET that is commonly used for medical imaging purposes in humans. It involves ingesting fluorodeoxyglucose-18 (FDG), which is a sugar molecule labeled with a fast-decaying radioactive fluorine. Because neurons require glucose to function and the radioactive fluorine makes it detectable with an MRI machine, this method can effectively localize recent brain activity while watching or performing an action immediately prior to entering the MRI machine. Using this technique, Erin found that mirror-neuron-like activation was more widespread across the brain of humans compared to their close chimpanzee relatives, suggesting a physical expansion of neural systems for social cognition in human evolution.
About midway through her PhD, Erin watched a nature documentary about domestication in dogs and foxes. With her ongoing research and longstanding fascination with brain evolution, combined with the comforting presence of her own dog sitting with her on the couch, she was transfixed: how was the brain changing in these species to enable the drastic changes in behaviors associated with domestication? Yet, the documentary made no mention of the brain at all. Erin shot a spontaneous email to a researcher studying domesticated foxes in Siberia that was featured in the documentary, and to her surprise, she got a response. She pitched her idea to study the neural basis of domesticated behaviors, and she was ultimately able to get a small sample of fox brains to scan in an MRI machine for a pilot study. Erin eventually found that foxes that had been repeatedly selected and bred for either docile or aggressive traits over the course of many generations had enlarged limbic areas, like the amygdala and hypothalamus, as well as an enlarged prefrontal cortex, compared to control foxes who had not been selected for any particular traits and were allowed to breed without intervention.
Meanwhile, Erin also reached out to local veterinary clinics, asking for MRI scans in order to pursue her own line of research on directed brain evolution in dogs. Different dog breeds have very distinct traits and appearances because of many, many generations of selecting and breeding individuals that show desirable traits, like in the fox domestication study in Siberia. This is how we have dogs that are retrievers, herding dogs, scenthounds, sighthounds, etc. – all very unique breeds (in both appearance and behavior) within the same canine species. Erin was convinced that canine neuroscience was the perfect testing bed for studying the evolution of the brain and behavior. She desperately wanted to pursue this line of work as she finished her PhD, but she wasn’t quite sure how to make it happen.
Having already established some connections with vet clinics in the Atlanta area and colleagues willing to share their resources and space, Erin took a risk. She decided to stay in Atlanta and take on a couple of shorter postdoc gigs to pay the bills instead of leaving town for a more traditional track of postdoctoral training. She did a short stint on brain plasticity for tool-making with Dr. Dietrich Stout at Emory and then another postdoc on intranasal oxytocin at Georgia State, all while writing grants to pursue her dog and fox neuroscience projects on the side. She describes it as “the wild west” and “a bit sketchy” – for instance, her first dog “behavior lab” was a Georgia State lab’s break room that a professor generously let her transform and repurpose. For a while, it was not at all clear if things would work out; grants were getting rejected, and she could feel the dismissive tone of colleagues who thought she was giving up on “real” neuroscience for something “cute”. But eventually, the tides began to turn when she got her first grant, allowing her to run her own dog brain imaging studies rather than relying on preexisting MRI scans. This led to her first major discovery and proof-of-principle that canine neuroscience was both feasible and scientifically promising. She found distinct neuroanatomical changes associated with dogs bred for specific purposes; for instance, scenthounds have expanded olfactory regions, and retrievers and sighthounds have enlarged visual and spatial navigation areas.
In the end, the risks paid off. Erin is now running her own lab at Harvard University, studying how differences in brain organization relate to differences in evolved behavior. This work involves neuroimaging and behavior work in dogs and other canids (e.g., foxes), as well as similar work in humans and other primates. In one current line of work (recently featured in the Netflix documentary, The Secret Life of Dogs), Erin’s lab is studying the neural changes in dogs that have been selected and bred for very specific behaviors, even within the same breed – for instance, German Shepherds bred for patrol work versus service work or for show. Through this and other studies, they are hoping to address the fundamental question – how does behavior evolve? It’s a question that is surprisingly hard to study, given the long timescale of evolution and the complexities of cross-species comparisons. Yet Erin identified a unique and fruitful niche in which to explore this question, which she has doggedly (pun intended) pursued despite the challenges and naysayers. She’s a protagonist that anyone would root for, and one that will undoubtedly inspire many others to em-bark upon their own scientific journeys.
Find out more about Erin and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Megan’s full interview with Erin on August 29, 2024 below!
