Dr. Anne Churchland
Professor Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (soon-to-be University of California - Los Angeles)
Postdoctoral Fellow University of Washington
PhD in Neuroscience University of California - San Francisco
Dr. Anne Churchland was immersed in the “big questions” about the brain from an early age. With prominent neuro-philosophers as parents, she was already well-acquainted with the field of neuroscience, though her own enthusiasm for the subject had yet to fully blossom. Initially, she was interested in childhood development, stemming from her experience volunteering at an elementary school and observing the different ways in which kids learned. She studied cognitive development as an undergraduate at Wellesley College, working with both infant and school-aged children, but found that the type of data she was collecting “wasn’t too much fun to play around with.” After graduating, she fortuitously landed a research technician job in the lab of Dr. Steve Lisberger at UCSF studying the primate oculomotor system. She loved the laboratory environment and having immensely complicated and rich eye movement data at her fingertips, and that was when the real fun began. It was this love for being in the lab and collecting exciting data that instilled her own passion for studying the brain and desire to do science for a living.
Anne relished her time in the Lisberger lab so much that she stayed on as a graduate student and completed her PhD in Neuroscience at UCSF. She enjoyed a fulfilling and productive graduate school experience, making important discoveries about how the primate extrastriate cortex processes visual motion information. She went on to complete postdoctoral research with Dr. Michael Shadlen at the University of Washington, continuing her work with primates to study sensory decision-making. She found evidence that monkeys’ performance on complex sensory decision-making tasks involved accumulating and integrating sensory evidence over time, and neural activity in the parietal cortex reflected that accumulating evidence.
As she went on to start her own lab at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, she wanted to study decision-making in the brain with a greater degree of precision that so far was only technically feasible in rodent models. However, many in the field - herself included - were unconvinced that rodents were capable of the types of complex decision-making she was interested in studying. She thus conducted some pilot research at Cold Spring Harbor before starting her lab to see whether rodents could perform complex perceptual decision-making tasks, such as those requiring categorical decisions (e.g., “fast” vs. “slow”) about a combined audio-visual stimulus. To her great surprise, she found that they could, and in fact, their cognitive capabilities and willingness to demonstrate those abilities were exactly what she needed to be able to address novel questions related to decision-making. At first, her switch of model organism was met with considerable skepticism from those in her field. Many of her colleagues whose opinions she respected told her that it would be a career-killing move. Nevertheless, Anne trusted her instincts and stayed the course, and she has gone on to prove herself right.
Today, Anne is a Professor and is in the process of moving her lab from Cold Spring Harbor to the University of California, Los Angeles. Her lab still studies decision-making, especially decision-making that requires animals to put together multiple pieces of information - such as integrating information across multiple sensory modalities. Her work relies heavily on theory and computational techniques at every level of investigation, from designing the experiments to interpreting the data. In particular, her lab seeks to identify the areas of the brain that are important for multisensory decision-making and figure out the underlying computations. In a newer line of work, they are also exploring the tremendous diversity of excitatory neuronal cell types and examining how these cell types contribute to different aspects of decision-making. Anne is also a strong believer in the power of collaborative science and is part of the International Behavior Laboratory (IBL), which seeks to bring together many laboratories to answer some of the bigger questions in neuroscience that are beyond the scale of a single lab.
In addition to her science, Anne is also well known for being an advocate for women in neuroscience and for speaking openly about balancing science and parenting. She is perhaps best known for having created Anne’s List, an extensive list of women in the fields of systems and computational neuroscience. This began as a very practical list of women whose work she encountered and whom she could nominate as speakers for the Computational and Systems Neuroscience (“Cosyne”) Conference (she was an organizer at the time). Since then, it has grown into a go-to resource for people who are trying to ensure that women are appropriately represented at their conferences, panels, awardee lists, etc. She is also refreshingly transparent about the challenges that come with being a mom in academia, both in terms of logistics as well as the associated [mis]perceptions and biases. As she began having children at the end of her PhD and beginning of her postdoc, she was perplexed to find that the ways in which her colleagues interacted with her and valued her opinions seemed to change. This made her postdoctoral experience a confusing time in which doing science lost some of its enjoyment; while she continued to succeed in terms of publishing, receiving fellowships and more, she was confused as to why her “words didn’t have any weight anymore”. While things improved over time and the “fun” in science returned, especially as she established her independence in starting her own lab, she acknowledges the many ways in which academia has room to improve in terms of how accepting and supportive it is of parenthood generally and motherhood in particular.
Despite these challenges, Anne’s excitement for experimenting and collecting data has carried through, and she has gone on to become one of the preeminent neuroscientists of her generation. Anyone who has the privilege of meeting Anne or hearing her present her work will immediately see her authentic enthusiasm for science. Even while her specific interests in and motivations for doing neuroscience research differ from those of her family, she acknowledges that their excitement about the field has undoubtedly rubbed off. Now, she is on the giving, rather than the receiving, end of that infectious enthusiasm, exemplifying just how thrilling it is to be a neuroscientist.
Check out the exciting research being conducted in Anne’s lab here…
…and listen to Megan’s interview with Anne on February 22nd, 2020 below or wherever you get your podcasts!
