Dr. Ann Hermundstad
Group Leader HHMI Janelia Research Campus
Postdoctoral Fellow Department of Physics & Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania
Department de Physique Théorique École Normale Supérieure
PhD in Physics University of California, Santa Barbara
Ann never envisioned her career in neuroscience. In her small town’s school, science was presented as a set of memorized concepts that didn’t engage or excite her. She didn’t understand that science was a career. She did have a strong inclination for art, writing, and math, but did not understand how to pursue art or writing. She decided to pursue engineering in college, following her idea of what felt like a more practical decision. Ultimately she found a path in which the creative and the practical converged--in the realm of science.
During her undergraduate education at the Colorado School of Mines, Ann experienced physics in a new way. Instead of asking students to memorize formulas, her professors taught physics as a logical framework for thinking about the physical world. Ann recalls being particularly fascinated by the stories her biophysics professor told from her days as a neurosurgeon removing brain tissue to reduce epilepsy in patients. Genuinely perturbed by the notion of a piece of tissue having such a striking yet unknown function, she became aware of neuroscience as this mysterious place with so much space for discovery and understanding.
Despite this seedling of a new passion for neuroscience, Ann approached the idea of graduate school with some hesitation. She had applied to math, physics and even cognitive science programs, but ultimately decided to pursue a physics PhD at University of California, Santa Barbara. Their program seemed like an interdisciplinary environment where she could pursue physics while exploring its applications in other fields, perhaps a good route to bridge into neuroscience.
At UCSB, she found Dr. Jean Carlson and her complex systems lab--a place where Jean supported students working to apply physics concepts to natural phenomena like forest fires, earthquakes, ecology, immunology, and neuroscience. Ann’s first research project involved earthquake physics and granular materials, and while she knew it was important work, she continued to feel a pull towards neuroscience. She began collaborating with colleagues in the psychology department, investigating the large-scale structural and functional organization of the human brain using neuroimaging. This was a huge step for Ann in finally connecting with neuroscience research, and it left her buzzing with more questions about how our brains are wired. Near the end of her PhD, she realized she still didn’t really understand what a neuron was. So, she centered her postdoc search on investigating the building blocks of the brain.
As part of her new postdoc position with Dr. Vijay Balasubramanian at the University of Pennsylvania, Ann worked with collaborators for a year in the Laboratoire de Physique Théorique at École Normale Supérieure in Paris. In her postdoc, Ann began to think about how the brain exploits the statistical regularities of nature, such as the horizon being horizontal, or trees growing vertically. These reliable patterns of our environment give it the structure the brain needs in order to make predictions or inferences necessary to guide behaviors. Much of Ann’s work is anchored in this unifying framework for thinking about the brain and how organisms interact with the world.
Her postdoctoral work involved comparing the flow of different sensory information through the brain and how the network architecture of the brain differs depending on the kind of sensory information it has evolved to process. We can conceptualize this architecture, which could be neural connections or neural activity dynamics, as tuned to the statistics of those sensory signals. For example, all the possible values of light are conceptually different from the possible values of odor. What would it mean to efficiently encode the space of visual features and how would that be different from encoding the space of olfactory features? Because of those sensory information differences, would we expect that the brain would have evolved different architectures to process those information streams? Ann’s work characterizes those architectural differences between different sensory information streams.
As a group leader at Janelia, Ann leverages frameworks like efficient coding--the idea that due to its physical limitations, the brain must encode information as efficiently as possible—to study flexible behavior. She is currently working to combine efficient coding with other theoretical frameworks in order to expand the range of brain phenomena it can help us understand, like the encoding of processes evolving over time. Ultimately, Ann takes the “why” approach. Why is the brain organized as it is? Does it build representations for the purpose of survival? Is there some generalizable principle of brain architecture that we can use to understand the goals of different brain systems?
While Ann loves science tremendously, she sometimes felt that she wasn’t right for the job, or that her personality didn’t fit the “classic” scientist mold. After her postdoc, she considered leaving academia. But instead of taking an industry offer, she decided to give the academic job search a try--”just to see” whether some positions out there would be a good fit for her. She is glad she did, because it led her to confront and shape her scientific identity, distill the most important elements of her pull to research, and understand that there are so many ways that scientists can be brilliant and creative.
Out of this process, she emerged with a greater understanding of her own approach to questioning nature, how to choose important problems to solve, as well as how to work on yourself without giving up who you are. These are the core concepts she cycles back to throughout her journey, and the most important ones she strives to foster through mentorship. Ann emphasizes the abundance of scientific “currents,” but not all of those currents are moving in useful directions. Her focus on finding the best strategies for asking and answering meaningful questions is reminiscent of efficient coding. She never forgets the most valuable resource--time. If you have a good strategy for asking meaningful questions, “you can make the most of it.”
Find out more about Ann here and about her group’s research here.
Listen to Daniela’s full interview with Ann on May 18th, 2021 below or wherever you get your podcasts!
