Dr. Nanthia Suthana
Assistant Professor University of California, Los Angeles
Postdoctoral Fellow University of California, Los Angeles
PhD in Neuroscience University of California, Los Angeles
Dr. Nanthia Suthana wasn’t introduced to neuroscience until she dropped out of school. As a young sophomore at UC Berkeley, Nanthia had been feeling lost, unsure of what she wanted to study or what she wanted to do with her life. She’d always been an academic overachiever, but her feelings of burnout and aimlessness were causing her grades and overall happiness to suffer. So she decided to leave school - whether permanently or temporarily was a matter of debate - and flew overseas. During a year of traveling around Europe and pursuing her artistic interests in Paris, Nanthia started reading for pleasure rather than for school for the first time in her life. In between painting, practicing French and munching on crepes, Nanthia started to read the stories of Oliver Sacks and to learn about famous figures in neuropsychology like Henry Molaison (H.M.). Something clicked. Her academic spark reignited, Nanthia was newly motivated to return to school and pursue neuroscience research. From then on, she never wavered from this path. As an Assistant Professor in Neuroscience at UCLA, Nanthia is now a pioneer in the fields of neuroscience and neurotechnology, making groundbreaking discoveries and developing new approaches for studying naturalistic learning and memory in the human brain.
After her year of travel and self-discovery, Nanthia transferred from Berkeley to UCLA in order to specifically pursue a neuroscience major. There, she threw herself into neuroscience courses, and her dramatically improved grades reflected her newfound enthusiasm and motivation. She also joined a neuroscience lab and completed an undergraduate thesis project on circadian regulation of long-term potentiation, thus solidifying her conviction to pursue a research career. She applied to graduate school and chose to stay at UCLA, where she joined the labs of Drs. Susan Bookheimer and Barbara Knowlton to study human learning and memory with high-resolution fMRI imaging of the human hippocampus. She also began a collaboration that later led to a postdoctoral position with Dr. Itzak Fried, who was doing single-neuron recordings in human epilepsy patients with implanted electrodes for identifying their seizure sites. As a postdoc, Nanthia worked with Dr. Fried to develop a method for using these electrodes to produce low-level deep brain stimulation that was imperceptible to the patients. They could therefore study fundamental questions of brain function, such as those related to memory, by recording from and stimulating specific parts of the brain. In particular, Nanthia found that stimulating the entorhinal cortex improved these patients’ spatial memory on a virtual navigation task; they navigated more quickly between remembered virtual locations and took shorter routes. This was a powerful demonstration of the immense potential in utilizing implanted electrodes in epilepsy patients to decipher the neural bases of learning and memory in the human brain.
As Nanthia began to establish her own lab at UCLA, new technological advances established in clinical settings raised exciting opportunities for groundbreaking ventures in human neuroscience research. In particular, Nanthia recognized the potential of a recently FDA-approved, chronically-implantable device for conducting deep-brain stimulation and electrophysiological recordings in freely moving human patients. Nanthia’s lab has since developed additional technology and methodology to use this device for those purposes. Using that technology, they have identified changes in oscillatory activity within the medial temporal lobe that are modulated by cognitive state and reflect freely moving human patients’ locations - not only of oneself, but also of others. This work provides an exciting demonstration in humans of self- and other-location representations that have previously only been found in non-human animals like rodents and bats. It also opens up innumerable avenues for future research on spatial and other forms of memory, social cognition, and much more in the human brain. Nanthia is especially excited for further technological developments that will open up even more research opportunities, and for more labs to join hers in utilizing these sorts of technologies for human neuroscience research. There are many more electrode-implanted patients eager to participate in research studies than her lab is capable of working with, and so with more labs working towards similar goals and more opportunities for collaborations, Nanthia feels that this field of research has enormous growth potential.
Collaborations and Interdisciplinary perspectives are central to Nanthia’s approach to research. While she has always been interested in questions of learning and memory, she has tackled these questions from many different angles throughout her training and career. Nanthia continues to take an interdisciplinary approach, collaborating closely with neurosurgeons, psychologists, engineers, and others, as well as assembling a similarly interdisciplinary team within her own lab. While working outside of one’s immediate area of expertise can sometimes come with feelings of discomfort, Nanthia thrives in that discomfort. That wasn’t always the case; like many students embarking on their neuroscience training, Nanthia recalls feeling initially overwhelmed by the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of neuroscience and the need to be “expert” in so many different areas. But with time, Nanthia has learned how to deal with those sorts of feelings of insecurity and imposter syndrome - not only by enhancing her own depth and breadth of expertise, but also by appreciating how helpful and rewarding it can be to work with others. These sorts of collaborations have had the added advantage of providing a framework for building large mentorship networks. Since there’s no such thing as a “perfect” mentor, Nanthia has found cultivating many mentors who can provide advice and support in different capacities to be extremely beneficial throughout her training and career. She encourages this for her trainees as well, while also relishing her own role as a mentor.
Nanthia also cares deeply about neuroscience outreach and improving science education - so that it doesn’t take leaving school to discover a passion for science, as was the case for her. She wants students to see that science isn’t about just memorizing facts, but rather about creativity and thinking outside the box: the same attributes that initially drew her towards art. While she spent a lot of time in school classrooms - as often as twice a week - when she was in graduate school, she now primarily oversees those programs and lets younger trainees have much of the facetime with school-aged students. These days, she spends more of her time teaching undergraduate classes at UCLA - including one of the same neuroscience courses that she herself took as an undergraduate, almost 20 years ago, when she was first captivated by the field. Between these various teaching and outreach endeavors, on top of her exciting, groundbreaking research on learning and memory in the human brain, she is surely igniting sparks of scientific fascination in countless young minds.
Find out more about the amazing work in Nanthia’s lab here.
Check out Megan’s full interview with Nanthia on November 2nd, 2020 below or wherever you get your podcasts!
