Dr. Austen Sitko
Dr. Austen Sitko
Postdoctoral Fellow Harvard Medical School
PhD in Neurobiology and Behavior Columbia University
Dr. Austen Sitko’s science career was born from her love for art. As a middle schooler carefully sketching a cow heart during a lab dissection, she first encountered science as an endeavor requiring a deep appreciation for detail, a quality she saw in herself. Austen later found validation of the art-science connection in neuroscientists’ reverence for Ramón y Cajal and the rich tradition of the artist-scientist. “There’s a stereotype that art and science are so different. But they’re not!” she says, laughing as she explains that she still loves working with her own hands, and can sit in a microscopy room for hours, “happy as a clam.” Today, as she performs a delicate dissection or uses microscopy to capture the beauty and intricacy of neuronal connections, her inner artist and scientist find a perfect harmony.
At the intersection of art and science is the power of observation—a fundamental cornerstone of scientific discovery and one of two clear driving forces in Austen’s scientific career. The other is a deep desire to better understand how and why brain circuitry goes awry in neuropsychiatric disorders. This latter force stems from her experience growing up around an uncle with schizophrenia and the time she spent wondering in what ways her uncle’s brain was different. While Austen at first envisioned taking a translational approach to this question, in both her graduate and postdoctoral work she has gravitated to basic science, specifically developmental neuroscience. She feels a strong pull towards the most fundamental questions of how brain circuits form and what minute wiring mistakes might underlie developmental and psychiatric disorders. This curiosity led her to do her graduate work in Dr. Carol Mason’s lab at Columbia University, where she studied axon-axon interactions in the developing visual system, characterizing the spatial organization of retinal ganglion cell projections.
Austen is now a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, studying auditory circuit development under the mentorship of Dr. Lisa Goodrich. She is particularly interested in a set of efferent projections from the brainstem to the cochlea, likely playing a modulatory role in auditory transmission. While she collaborates with labmates to further characterize the subsets of these efferents, Austen is primarily focused on the mechanisms underlying their development. These efferents arise concomitantly with cochlear afferents innervating the brainstem, and Austen is fascinated by the potential for an interaction between these two developmental processes. Might there be crosstalk between these reciprocal projections? She is currently developing tools to address this question, and in the meantime, the artist in her revels in the incredibly fine dissection work required to access the cochlea through the tiny bones of the ear.
Throughout her career, Austen has had several mentors who stoked her curiosity while also showing genuine care for her development as a scientist and person. She is particularly thrilled that Dr. Goodrich, her postdoctoral advisor, is exceedingly transparent about the practices and strategies with which she runs her lab. Austen recognizes that this “peek behind the curtain at the engine of being an academic scientist” will help guide her own professional development, preparing her to eventually start her own lab. Austen is also upfront in acknowledging how fortunate she feels to have had these formative mentorship experiences: “the important thing is to always be aware of your privilege and what you’ve been lucky enough to have, and try to pay if forward when you can.” Throughout her career, Austen will pay it forward as she mentors graduate students in the Goodrich lab and her own future lab members, drawing from the examples of her most formative mentors. And she’ll likely always relish the chance to slip back into the microscope room or pick up a set of dissection tools while teaching her trainees, instilling in them the power of observation and the simple joy of working with one’s hands.
Check out Nancy’s full interview with Austen on November 18th, 2018 here:
