Dr. Aqilah McCane

Assistant Professor Oregon Health and Science University
Postdoctoral Fellow Oregon Health and Science University
PhD Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis

Early in her college days at Indiana University Bloomington, Dr. Aqilah McCane was struggling to stay afloat. Working a full-time job on top of classes to pay for rent and groceries, her grades were not stellar. A brief research stint in a developmental psychology lab piqued her curiosity, but the experience made her realize she had no time to volunteer in a lab on top of her already-overwhelming schedule. She assumed her mediocre grades would preclude her from admission to a paid undergraduate research program, and this might have been the end of Aqilah’s involvement in research if not for an email from the program’s chair encouraging her to apply. This paid research program gave Aqilah the opportunity to thrive in a research lab, opening a new world of career possibilities. Today, Aqilah is an assistant professor at Oregon Health and Science University. Her lab at the Oregon National Primate Research Center uses both rodent and non-human primate models to understand vulnerability to addiction during adolescence.  

Aqilah began college as a psychology major—a decision she made not with any serious career goals in mind, but simply because she had enjoyed psychology class in high school. One of her fellow psych major friends was working in a lab that needed more volunteers, so Aqilah joined the lab as well. The experience sparked an interest in research, and Aqilah wondered what working in other labs might be like. Thankfully, her admittance to the paid research program for students from underrepresented backgrounds—Initiative for Maximizing Student Diversity (IMSD)—gave her the chance to find out. Through IMSD, Aqilah worked in Dr. Brian O’Donnell’s lab, where a thoughtful graduate student taught her rodent surgeries and EEG analysis techniques. Outside of the lab, IMSD also provided resources to help students apply to graduate school, including GRE prep courses and application support. With a growing confidence in her own abilities, a burgeoning passion for neuroscience, and the support network of IMSD, Aqilah began her PhD at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis. 

As a PhD student, Aqilah was co-mentored by two PIs—Drs. Cristine Czachowski and Chris Lapish—who complemented each other in both temperament and topic, creating a strong training environment for Aqilah. Cristine was a well-established expert in behavioral models of alcohol use disorder. Chris was a new PI who focused on in vivo electrophysiology and computational modeling. Aqilah created a project at the nexus of these two areas of expertise, using behavior and electrophysiology to understand network dynamics underlying alcohol addiction. Aqilah distinctly remembers the moment she discovered the phenotype that would form the basis of her PhD work. Chris had a hypothesis that dopamine concentrations play a key role in excessive drinking. He suggested that Aqilah test whether pharmacological inhibition of catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT), the enzyme that breaks down dopamine, affects drinking behavior. She found that COMT inhibition, which increases cortical dopamine concentration, indeed suppresses alcohol intake in a cue-evoked drinking paradigm in rats. Aqilah brought the first bit of data to Chris and was shocked at his level of surprise and excitement—he had hypothesized this exact thing, hadn’t he? Until that moment, it had not sunk in for Aqilah that hypotheses were guesses that were often wrong or difficult to prove. Chris’ reaction impressed upon her that finding data that unequivocally supports your hypothesis is a rare and beautiful occasion—an occasion that always leaves you wanting more! 

While her discovery that COMT inhibition suppressed cue-driven alcohol consumption was the cornerstone of her dissertation, Aqilah also spent time in graduate school learning to code and becoming more familiar with computational modeling. She remembers when Chris suggested she write some code for analysis of a new behavioral task they had set up. He gave her a manual and left her to work on it. Despite no previous coding experience, Aqilah successfully wrote working code, and the sensation was thrilling. She remembers, “It was so empowering and allowed me to think of myself as someone who could do anything if I had enough time and I had the resources—that there really were no limits to what I could learn.” With this important lesson still ringing in her ears, Aqilah applied for postdoc positions, this time ready to explore the world beyond Indiana. 

Aqilah ultimately chose to do her postdoc with Dr. Bita Moghaddam at Oregon Health and Science University. The Moghaddam lab had been attractive from several standpoints. At this point in her career, Aqilah was torn between academia and industry, and Bita—unlike many PIs at the time—was openly supportive of her trainees choosing industry positions. Also, Bita was a well-established scientist with a large lab, and Aqilah saw how being a part of such a network could augment her training. During her postdoc, Aqilah discovered key differences in dopamine dynamics that may explain why adolescents are more vulnerable to addiction. Specifically, she used two training paradigms that model different reward-seeking behaviors. The first was Pavlovian conditioning in which mice are trained to associate a certain cue (e.g., a chime sound) with a reward such that they begin to exhibit a dopamine rush to the cue alone. The second type was operant conditioning, in which the animals must initiate an action (e.g., pressing a lever) to receive a reward. Aqilah found that adolescent mice had a starkly higher dopamine response in Pavlovian conditioning compared to operant conditioning, whereas adult mice exhibit a similar dopaminergic response in both reward paradigms. Aqilah believes this result might explain the brain network differences in adolescents that underlie their increased vulnerability to addiction and reckless behavior.

As Aqilah was crafting her application for the NIH K99/R00 fellowship—a competitive “transition” award that funds the end of one’s postdoc and early years of their independent lab—she identified a few passionate, accomplished women whom she wanted to have on her mentorship team. She specifically wanted support for some complex computational work she was proposing. Coincidentally, two of these women—Drs. Marlene Cohen and Kathy Grant—do research with non-human primates, and this opened Aqilah’s eyes to how primate research could complement her rodent work. Specifically, rodent adolescence is a matter of weeks, an aspect that makes manipulations or long behavioral paradigms difficult. Conversely, primate adolescence occurs over a timespan of years, and primates are able to do much more cognitively demanding tasks, better modeling human addiction behavior. Aqilah began attending Marlene’s lab meetings, learning about the technology, behavioral tasks, and analyses possible in primates, including chronic electrophysiology recordings during awake behavior. When choosing where to start her own lab, Aqilah’s current position at the Oregon National Primate Research Center was especially attractive because the center has several behavioral paradigms perfect for her research already optimized and running smoothly. 

Find out more about Aqilah and her lab’s research here.

Listen to Melissa’s full interview with Aqilah on January 6, 2025 below!