Dr. Preeya Khanna
Ph.D in Bioengineering University of California San Francisco / University of California Berkeley
Postdoctoral Fellow University of California San Francisco
When Dr. Preeya Khanna’s uncle was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease during her childhood, she was struck by the extreme fluctuations in his symptoms. There were days he needed help standing up from the table and others when he couldn’t sit still. Preeya wondered if it would be possible to help him find an intermediate between the periods of high and low activity often experienced by Parkinson’s patients. Could the brain be re-engineered to restore functional movements to patients suffering from movement disorders? These are the questions Preeya has been returning to throughout her career, now as a postdoc in Dr. Karunesh Ganguly’s lab at UCSF.
Although she would eventually circle back to researching the questions she had asked herself years ago, Preeya originally intended to become a doctor. Preeya’s love of biology began in high school, when she participated in a lab looking for novel types of bacteriophages in the soil behind her classroom. Medicine seemed like an impactful career path for pursuing her passion. However, in college she found the fast decision making required in medicine left less time to investigate new ideas and unanswered questions. Instead, she was drawn to research, which gave her the time and resources to develop a mechanistic understanding of clinical conditions. As she gained an interest in using mathematical frameworks to explain biological phenomena, Preeya decided to forgo her remaining premed requirements and pursue a math major in addition to her bioengineering degree. However, it was not until an internship in industry that she seriously considered graduate school. A mentor advised Preeya that a PhD would allow her to use her twenties to get smarter and would be a path to roles in industry where she could influence the direction of her projects, serve as a mentor, and create something that had a broad-reaching impact on people’s lives.
With this advice in mind, Preeya began applying to bioengineering PhD programs, writing research proposals on topics ranging from closed loop glucose monitoring to intracranial pressure measurement devices. It was not until interviews, when talking with professors about their work, that Preeya became more excited about neuroscience specifically. As a PhD student at Berkeley, she integrated this budding interest with her extensive background in bioengineering and mathematics in Dr. Jose Carmena’s lab. Motivated by her uncle’s experience with Parkinson’s, Preeya chose to study the role of beta oscillations in the motor cortex (a neural activity signal known to be aberrant in Parkinson’s patients) in movement execution. Remarkably, she found that training non-human primates to reduce the power of their beta oscillations before movement led to more fluid motions and faster movement onset times, a finding with many potential clinical applications.
While this project wrapped up, Preeya joined another project in the Carmena lab that involved working directly with a stroke patient to develop new technologies for aiding rehabilitation. This new project allowed her to fulfill the vision she had in college of developing better therapies for clinical conditions through a deeper understanding of the underlying mechanisms. There was only one challenge – the patient was on the other side of the Atlantic. So Preeya boarded a plane to Spain and began collaborating with another lab to develop a brain-machine interface capable of helping this stroke patient regain some use of her arm. While other treatments that the patient received may have caused confounding effects and thus posed some challenges to their research, it was nonetheless exciting to see the patient demonstrate substantial improvement in the ability to use her arm.
Although she originally intended to continue work on this type of clinical research at a medical device company after her PhD, Preeya found herself drawn to a post-doc, where she could investigate the lower-level mechanisms of brain machine interface-based interventions. She found the perfect fit in Dr. Karunesh Ganguly’s lab at UCSF, where she uses electrical stimulation to improve reaching and grasping in a non-human primate stroke model. Preeya was particularly drawn to this project because of her experience in Spain. Even though Preeya and the team in Spain were able to improve their patient’s upper arm control, the team did not see as much improvement in the patient’s hand mobility, which is particularly important for fine motor skills. Preeya hopes that studying rehabilitation of hand motor movements in an animal model will lead to improved therapies that give patients the joy of once again working with their hands.
Heavily influenced by both her clinical and basic research experiences, Preeya decided that the best place to focus on the intersection of these interests was in her own lab as a principal investigator instead of in industry. In her own lab, she plans to use animal models that more accurately reflect the types of strokes she observes in human patients. This approach will allow her to understand how damage to motor and sensory regions together in stroke patients impacts the recovery of motor abilities. She hopes to use these novel insights to develop therapies optimally suited for strokes where sensory feedback is disrupted along with motor pathways.
Looking at Preeya’s far-reaching career, one is struck by the breadth of knowledge required to ask such creative and multifaceted questions. However, working at the intersection of bioengineering and systems neuroscience, Preeya has, at times, found herself questioning whether she has the depth of expertise required to carry out the experiments she is interested in. Science is intrinsically risky; as Preeya described, “you take a leap of faith and hope the leap is small enough that your estimation matches where you end up.” But, during times of self-doubt, she credits conversations with her peers, mentors and friends for helping her navigate her uncertainty. Because of their willingness to share stories of their own mistakes or challenges, her support network is a reminder that science is an inherently human endeavor -- it is through iteration and collaboration that those leaps of faith lead to impactful science. Through her interdisciplinary background and bold approach to science, Preeya is already well on her way to making discoveries that will help answer some of the questions she asked herself as a child all those years ago.
Check out Nancy’s full interview with Priya on March 4th, 2021 below or wherever you get your podcasts!
