My Scientific Career Arc

I decided to major in neuroscience during my undergraduate university education. At the time, I didn't really know what it was, but it sounded really cool, and it honestly just felt like the "right" thing to do. Once I got into it, I found that I really liked it. Walking across campus one glorious spring day, I very randomly ran into a friend from high school I hadn't seen in four years. He told me that he was working in this neuroscience research laboratory and I should stop by and check it out as the professor was always looking for good undergraduate research volunteers. I followed my old friend's advice and soon enough I was working in a neuroscience research laboratory! 

What many people likely do not understand about US biomedical research laboratories is that most do not necessarily study all aspects of a "disease," although public-facing statements will indicate that they do so. Most study a VERY specific component of a disease or disorder or even just basic biology that may generally contribute to diseases or disorders. So a lab that studies a psychological disorder like schizophrenia might look at a few proteins in one part of the brain that contribute to the disorder. They will say that they study schizophrenia, but they are actually much more narrowly focused on one aspect of it. These disorders and diseases are just so complex that it is nearly impossible to look at every facet of it. But many labs approaching the diseases/disorders from different angles start to make a more complete image of what is going on.

So the laboratory I worked in as an undergraduate had this very narrow focus on a general neuroscience process involving how a certain class of proteins helps the part of the brain cell that releases neurotransmitters (for example, dopamine or serotonin) interact with each other to help that release proceed. It was very basic and not really tied to any one specific disease and just studying a general brain cell process (for those who care, these are the proteins that tetanus toxin and Botox mess with, so please stay up to date on your tetanus vaccines and avoid Botox if you can). Honestly, it was not the most stimulating of research for someone who was interested in bigger neuroscience questions, but the professor I worked for was great, and I learned a lot about how to do science from him.

One day I attended a seminar that a visiting professor gave about drug addiction and how we need more research to help people who are suffering from it. I was inspired, especially since I had a family member die from a drug overdose, so it was personal. So, when it came time to apply to graduate school, I applied to a number of different programs with expertise in this area of neuroscience. Fortunately, I was accepted into a prestigious one, and I was very excited.

I won't take you through all the twists and turns of getting a PhD in neuroscience. Getting a PhD is not necessarily getting a degree in being smart (although that helps), but it is getting a degree in doing something very hard and requires a lot of dedication and perseverance through discouragement and frustration. Research is tough! I was able to join a dissertation laboratory where I researched how cannabis and cannabis-related drugs changed the way brain cells functioned. It was a lot of pharmacology, cellular biology, and physiology. In the end, I published seven scientific papers. 

This was my favorite one that I published as a graduate student. I had always wanted a paper in the journal Molecular Pharmacology and I was able to finally get one!

I then went on to do a postdoctoral fellowship, which is something most graduate students in the biomedical students do, sort of like a medical residency or a specialization training in other fields. You do a lot of the same things, but often at a higher level (you are more capable now after all). For my postdoc I switched drugs and studied opioids, again looking at how opioids changed brain cell function. I was able to get a really large paper in Nature Neuroscience, a pretty darn prestigious journal in the neuroscience field (near the top).

After the postdoc, I landed my dream job. I got a faculty position that let me start my own independent research laboratory where I could hire scientists, and I could decide what kinds of things to study. Of course, this carried an immense weight of having to find the money to pay for it all, which involved writing a lot of research grants. And I mean A LOT. But it was pretty rewarding. My laboratory further expanded its research portfolio and we started looking at drug consumption behavior of alcohol and opioids as well as what happens to the kids of moms that used opioids while they were pregnant. Here are three of my favorite papers from my laboratory.

Overall, I have "published" over 55 papers as a scientist with a lot of talks and other oral presentations all around the world too. Publishing in science is a little weird. You can look at the author lists of these papers I highlighted above and try and figure out who wrote what in the paper. Author lists are confusing, because not everyone on the list actually wrote anything. The first author listed in the biomedical field usually did most of the writing, while the last author signed off on all the writing and often did a lot of editorial work. They are also usually the one that paid for it all with their grant money. The middle authors sometimes wrote parts of it, sometimes ran some of the experiments, or sometimes were valuable consultants to the project. Across my 55 papers I have been all of those things: a writer, an editor, an experimenter, and a consultant. But I also review MANY papers and edit a lot of other people's work too. So I am well versed in writing and editing. Of those 55 papers, I wrote probably 95% of nine of the papers. A few were 50-50 with someone else. I supervised/had the final editing say on a lot of them. And others I wrote a few paragraphs in. A handful I just read over, and I offered my two cents on the content on the final product (but I helped the project along the way).

But the catch of all this is, my entire experience for the last 20-plus years has been scientific writing, which is a subclass of technical writing. It is generally very explanatory, didactic, and straight to the point with little fluff. It is very dry. There is also no character dialogue whatsoever in it. So when I decided to try out fiction writing, I had to adapt my writing style dramatically. And that was quite the process. More on that to come!