Written by Suzanne Nolan, Ph.D.
As it turns out, despite writing being one of the main components of my job as a postdoctoral fellow and a budding academic, sitting down to write about myself and share with the Vanderbilt community has felt daunting, as the subject of my writing is seldom myself. But here goes:
I grew up in a small town in rural Illinois, a place where the big event on Friday night was perhaps catching a movie at a small movie theater located in the town square or simply driving around the town square to see who else was out and about, often parking there to talk for hours. From an early age, my parents extolled the importance of receiving an education, particularly as the key to achieving wealth in adulthood, and I understood this as the key to many of the opportunities the world has to offer. After graduating high school, I was fortunate to attend my dream school just an hour away at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, beginning my journey in science as a pre-med biology major.
You see, in communities where the highest-paid and most esteemed professions are doctors and lawyers, a young woman who has done well in science is often pushed at an early age into becoming a physician. And so in the early years of college, I chased this dream, despite the number of ways that the universe at large tried to show me this wasn’t the best use of my talents, eventually coming to a dead stop with no idea which way to turn. It was around this time that I took my first biological psychology course, and a new course for my life began to take shape. The very idea that we could attempt to link aspects of a person’s behaviors to a biological trait, or even a physical location within the body, has become the passion that drives my career forward. After learning about the academic career path, I was, and still am, enchanted with the idea that I could make a career out of answering whatever questions I had about how changes within the brain’s structure or function could help explain observable differences in behavior.
After finishing my undergraduate degree at UIUC, I turned my sights on PhD programs. When applying for graduate programs, I focused on programs with an emphasis on combining research training in developmental and behavioral neuroscience with instruction in teaching pedagogy. After joining Dr. Joaquin Lugo’s Developmental Neuroscience Lab at Baylor University, over a series of publications, my graduate work detailed the behavioral and neuroimmune deficits in a murine model of autism (the Fmr1 knockout), and how basal characteristics interact with post- and peri-natal experiences to shape these phenotypes into adulthood. As a result of this training, I developed frameworks for considering neuropsychiatric disorders across the lifespan. Still, I knew that to understand how behavior was linked to brain function, I would need to gather tools to measure physical changes deep within the brain that could be leveraged in combination with my behavioral phenotyping expertise.
Since arriving at Vanderbilt in 2019 in the lab of Dr. Cody Siciliano as a postdoctoral fellow, I’ve been lucky to work with so many talented scientists and mentors during my time here, both in the lab and across the campus. In this role, I have extended my expertise to include analytical chemistry techniques, longitudinal operant learning paradigms, and transgene-mediated optical imaging approaches to characterize the neural microcircuitry across multiple species involved in complex decision-making. At the time of writing, I am actively on the job market, trying to secure the coveted tenure-track position, where I hope to combine my previous experience from graduate school and my postdoctoral work to understand what aspects of adolescent development render an individual susceptible to substance use disorders and in particular how dopaminergic microcircuit mechanisms governing information encoding evolve across the lifespan both in normal and disease states. After living in new places and meeting so many amazing people as a result of these career moves, I’m excited for what this journey holds next.