Dr. Christie Fowler
Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Behavior University of California, Irvine
Postdoctoral Fellow Cleveland Clinic and Scripps Institue, Florida
PhD in Neuroscience Florida State University, Tallahasseee
Dr. Christie Fowler’s journey through neuroscience is full of twists and turns. At times she was determined to work in a clinical setting, and at other times she was convinced she belonged in front of a classroom. Ultimately, she found that basic neuroscience was her true passion. Today, she is an Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California, Irvine, where her lab studies the neurobiological mechanisms underlying motivated behaviors in the contexts of addiction and neuropsychiatric disorders.
Although Christie was already interested in the mind and psychology during college, her small liberal arts school – Baldwin Wallace University – had very little neuroscience to offer. She found neurobiology fascinating, but given the opportunities available to her, she focused mainly on clinical psychology. When her graduate school applications to clinical psychology programs proved unsuccessful, she took a year off to further explore her interests and gain more experience working directly with patients (which is a critical component of clinical psychology training). While she enjoyed these experiences working in a group home for adults with developmental disabilities and volunteering in a geriatric psychiatric ward, she was struck by how few treatments were available for these populations. In the first major pivot of her career trajectory (twist #1), she thus decided to focus her graduate training on studying underlying biological causes to inform new and better therapeutics, as opposed to implementing current treatments in a clinical setting. With a reinvigorated interest in the brain, she decided to pursue neuroscience.
With a reinvigorated interest in the brain, Christie applied and was accepted to Florida State University’s neuroscience graduate program. She joined the lab of a new professor at the time, Dr. Zuoxin Wang, after a particularly engaging and inspiring conversation at a faculty dinner. While some might have considered it a risky move to be a PI’s very first graduate student, Christie felt like she was the real risk, as she was coming in with very little research experience. However, Dr. Wang identified her as a smart, motivated student with the personality of a quick learner and enthusiastic mentee. In turn, Christie found in Dr. Wang an incredibly supportive and understanding mentor – one who wholeheartedly encouraged her in her career, but was also very supportive of Christie maintaining a healthy work-life balance, particularly when she had her first child near the end of graduate school. In his lab, she studied neurogenesis in monogamous prairie voles and was among the first to demonstrate adult neurogenesis outside of the olfactory bulb or hippocampus. This exciting finding initially invited considerable skepticism, so it proved a challenging but invaluable exercise in learning to trust the science and advocate for herself.
Having such fond memories of her time at a liberal arts college, Christie openly proclaimed throughout graduate school that she did not want to work at a research-focused university but rather at a teaching-focused college. She thus engaged in significant pedagogy training during her time in graduate school (which her PI was wholly supportive of). She knew that she still needed to do a postdoc in order to achieve her goal of attaining a faculty position at a liberal arts college, but she decided to take a significant shift in research focus (twist #2). For her postdoc, she decided to switch fields and study multiple sclerosis (MS). Christie felt particularly passionate about studying MS because her family has a history with the disease. . She thus joined a lab at the Cleveland Clinic and embarked on a project that involved imaging postmortem tissue from human MS patients after rapid autopsy. Unfortunately, this time in her career presented a number of challenges. First, she was struggling to find suitable childcare options for her son after a particularly bad daycare experience. Thankfully, her retired parents were able to come in an RV and help care for her son. However, her research began to feel a little too personal when she received a call to image tissue from a woman with MS who had died in a terrible RV accident…a description which could have fit her own mother. Although it was a different woman and her mother turned out to be fine, it was a terrifying experience. Meanwhile, her new PI was proving to be considerably less supportive of family-life balance than Dr. Wang had been. They also didn’t want her to spend time on grant writing and other tasks that would take away time from her research in the short-term but help her career in the long-term. All of these factors, combined with the realization that this particular line of research would be exceptionally hard to pursue at a liberal arts college (this rapid autopsy procedure was only happening a few places in the whole world), led her to terminate her postdoctoral position (twist #3).
Christie, along with her husband and son, moved back to her parents’ home in Florida and took some time to regroup. Returning to what she thought was her primary passion, she started teaching at a number of different venues – a liberal arts college called Florida Atlantic University Honors College, a local community college, and college-level courses at a high school. These different positions required teaching very different populations of students, and she had to learn to adapt her teaching appropriately rather than applying a one-size-fits-all approach. However, after multiple years of this, she started feeling the monotony of teaching the same courses over and over, and to her surprise, she found that she really missed research. One day, one of her students raved to her about a professor with whom he was doing a research project at the Scripps Research Institute in Florida: Dr. Paul Kenny. After looking more into his work, she decided to approach him about doing another postdoc (twist #4!), and he offered her a position.
In Dr. Kenny’s lab, Christie began a project to develop a protocol for intravenous nicotine self-administration in mice – something that many had previously tried and failed at doing. Christie humbly credits her eventual success to her relative naivete; she didn’t realize how difficult a challenge it had been in the field, but it may have also proved beneficial that she came in with fresh eyes and fearlessness. She then tried this protocol on some of their knock-out mouse models lacking the nicotinic α5 acetylcholine receptor subunit and saw an increase in nicotine self-administration, even to levels that would cause seizures in wildtype mice. Interestingly, data from humans started to emerge from other groups showing that allelic differences in the gene for this receptor was related to nicotine dependence in humans. This helped pave the way for Christie to further explore the molecular and circuit mechanisms by which the α5 receptor mediates susceptibility to nicotine addiction. Specifically, she identified an inhibitory pathway from the habenula to the interpeduncular nucleus that is normally activated by α5-containing nicotinic acetylcholine receptors to limit nicotine intake, but in the absence of these particular receptors leads to excess nicotine consumption and addiction vulnerability.
With this exciting discovery under her belt, and having determined that she wanted to run her own research lab in addition to teaching, Christie decided to apply for faculty positions at research-oriented universities (twist #5!). She accepted an offer at the University of California, Irvine and has been there ever since. Her lab continues to study mechanisms underlying addiction (particularly nicotine addiction). They are also embarking on a relatively new venture looking at a noncanonical form of cell communication – extracellular vesicular release. Although this is an area that Christie became interested in relatively early on in her career, recently developed technology now allows them to visualize extracellular vesicle release in vivo, and they are starting to see tantalizing evidence that this form of cell signaling is accentuated by nicotine.
Christie has demonstrated remarkable flexibility, determination, and fearlessness throughout her nonlinear career path. At many different points along her journey, she took a step back, reassessed, and then nimbly took the steps necessary to attain her redefined goals. Some of her key priorities she identified were having sufficient resources to do animal model-based research; being in a collaborative environment that was welcoming to women and other underrepresented groups; and being able to maintain a happy family life in addition to a stimulating and fulfilling work life. These priorities led her to UC Irvine, despite being a very different environment than she initially envisioned for herself. She has remained there ever since and has flourished, conducting groundbreaking research and now serving as the Director of UC Irvine’s Interdepartmental Neuroscience Graduate Program. Undoubtedly the many students and trainees she oversees will benefit from Christie’s experience in navigating the winding road of scientific training and will be inspired to follow their own passions, wherever they may lead.
Find out more about Christie and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Rianne’s full interview with Christie on October 31, 2021 below!
