Dr. Monique Smith
Assistant Professor, UC San Diego
Postdoctoral Fellow, Stanford University
PhD in Neuroscience, OHSU
As a PhD student investigating whether pain drives alcohol consumption, Dr. Monique Smith made a startling discovery. Mice going through alcohol withdrawal showed heightened pain sensitivity — but so did their sober control mouse neighbors. After confirming that, no, she hadn’t also given alcohol to the control mice by accident, plus countless additional experiments to confirm her results, she concluded that the alcohol-drinking mice’s pain hypersensitivity was somehow spreading to other, non-drinking mice. This surprising finding led Monique to study the biological mechanisms of this phenomenon – a pursuit that she continues to this day. Now an Assistant Professor at UC San Diego, her lab studies the neural mechanisms of empathy and the social contagion of pain and analgesia.
Before this groundbreaking discovery in her PhD that set her on a straight trajectory towards her current position, Monique’s path was less clear-cut. A first-generation college student, that was working full time during undergrad, Monique felt ill-prepared and overwhelmed, with a lack of understanding of what career options were available. She decided to switch from pre-med to psychology, and as a part of this major she took a Biological Psychology class that left her transfixed. Learning about the neural underpinnings of sensation and perception for the first time, Monique couldn't believe how little was actually known. “I fully thought scientists had things figured out…that you could go into science and discover something new was truly never something I ever thought about up until that point.” But once she did, she was hooked. There weren’t many research opportunities at her university, California State University San Marcos, she actively pursued a position in the one rodent research lab within the Psychology department. That lab studied addiction, which struck Monique as a fascinating topic to study, in part because she knew people in her life who had experienced addiction and overdose. For the remainder of her undergraduate and into a master’s degree, she worked in this lab to study behavioral and mechanistic differences between dissociative anesthetics, like PCP and ketamine, and other drugs of abuse.
Even though she had fallen in love with scientific research and determined she wanted to go to graduate school, the road to get there was not an easy one. In the midst of the 2008 financial crisis, Monique was fired from the lab where she was working to pay her way through her master’s degree. Monique couldn’t find another job and had to take out student loans to finish her degree. Meanwhile, her first attempt at applying to PhD programs proved unsuccessful. Although it was an extremely challenging time in her life, she landed on her feet. She spent some time working in a new lab at UCLA that reinvigorated her love for and confidence in science. While working on a project to develop a mouse model of migraine pain, Monique found the venture of developing rodent models of human conditions to be particularly rewarding. Although she may not have known it at the time, this would turn out to be a strong interest that Monique would continue to pursue throughout her career. With this new confidence, she completed her master’s thesis and was admitted to graduate schools on her second try.
Going into her PhD program at Oregon Health and Sciences University (OHSU), Monique sought to merge her previous experiences in addiction and pain research to study their overlapping neural circuitry. To that end, she arranged for a co-advisorship between Dr. Andrey Ryabinin, who studies alcohol addiction, and Dr. Mary Heinricher, who studies pain. Remarkably, Monique’s discovery of “socially transferred pain” started out as a side project before she switched gears and fully embraced it as her main project mid-way through her PhD. After confirming that mice in nearby cages had "caught" pain hypersensitivity from their neighbors, she went on to show that it required olfactory cues and involved the anterior cingulate cortex. By the time she completed her PhD, she knew this wasn’t just a dissertation topic—it was the foundation for her career.
Having taken a number of years doing her master’s and various research stints before starting her PhD, Monique was eager for a stable, better-paying job by the time she graduated. She considered fellowships that would allow her to go directly into a PI position, but her advisor Mary encouraged her to do a postdoc. Eager to work at Stanford and in a bigger lab with full access to the latest and greatest tools in systems neuroscience, Monique reached out to the most famous neuroscience PIs at Stanford she could think of. One of those PIs, Dr. Robert Malenka, responded positively, and he was even enthusiastic about her goal to continue studying the social transfer of pain.
When she arrived in the Malenka lab, Rob challenged her to establish a new, more robust behavioral model of socially transmitted pain sensitivity. She thus developed a group-housing paradigm where she could directly compare the behaviors within and between two pairs of socially interacting mice. In the first pair, one “subject” mouse received a painful stimulus, and the second “bystander” mouse did not. By comparing this “bystander” mouse to the second pair of mice that did not receive any painful stimulus or social exposure to pain (i.e., the control group), Monique demonstrated once again that pain hypersensitivity was “socially transferred” from the subject to the bystander mouse in only one hour of social interaction. With this paradigm, she went on to show that social contagion of pain required anterior cingulate projections to the nucleus accumbens and was dissociable, at the levels of both neural circuits and behavior, from social transmission of fear. Finally, she and Rob were steadfast in also determining whether a physiological state of positive valence could also be socially transmitted. After she tried a number of things that didn’t work, she attempted to see whether analgesia was transmissible. Though skeptical at first, Monique tested whether morphine given to one mouse could also have analgesic effects for an untreated bystander following pain induction in both mice. To her great surprise, it worked, and it even involved the same neural circuitry as the social transmission of pain – thus rounding out her exciting postdoctoral work that was ultimately published in Science.
Today, Monique continues to study the circuit mechanisms underlying the social transmission of pain and analgesia in her own lab at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). Before establishing her lab at UCSD, she spent a year in a tenure-track position at another institution that wasn’t a good fit and where she felt very unhappy. With support from key mentors and colleagues, she re-entered the job market and ultimately obtained her current position. Broadly, Monique’s new lab seeks to understand how social factors change the brain and body. In this vein, her lab is branching out into other areas like the microbiome and pregnancy, as well as digging into the neural basis of empathy in mice.
Beyond her already significant scientific contributions, Monique also aims to have a significant, positive impact on the people in her lab. From her own experiences as a trainee, she understands firsthand the profound impact that a positive mentor can have. “The people that helped me believe in myself and have confidence and become the person that I am - they changed my entire life,” she reflects, “and if I can be that for even one of my trainees or mentors, then I’ve made the impact that I want to make.” After all, she knows better than anyone just how profoundly another individual can impact one’s own experience. Already, her scientific ideas and positive outlook on improving the culture of mentorship in academia are proving to be highly contagious.
Find out more about Monique and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Nancy’s full interview with Monique on December 11, 2024 below!
