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Meet the Community: Rebecca Vislay
Interview by Brian Gottesman
Q: How is your third year going? A: Very good, actually. It's my favorite year so far. A: I've finally finished classes and the teaching requirement, so now it's really just me working a lot in the lab. I am teaching this semester, but now teaching is an added bonus, so it takes the pressure off having to fulfill requirements. It's pretty much all about the thesis, which is good. It's a good place to be. A: We were required to take classes the first year, and classes were pretty intense. I'm in the MCCB [Molecular, Cellular, and Chemical Biology] program, which is a joint training program between MCB and CCB [Chemistry and Chemical Biology], and we were required to take a class in the chemistry department. So my first semester was really just learning all of advanced organic chemistry in ten weeks [laughs]. It didn't leave much time for doing the rotation research, but I did enjoy the rotations. I did three wildly different rotations in three very different labs. A: I did my first rotation with Matt Michael, doing the biochemistry of DNA damage. The work was familiar because as an undergraduate I did structural biology at the University of Pittsburgh. For the second rotation I wanted to try something completely different, so I joined Elena Kramer's lab in OEB [Organismic & Evolutionary Biology], doing evolutionary developmental biology on plants, which I had never really studied before. And then my final rotation was in the lab I'm in now, Florian Engert's lab, which was at the time just getting started. He had only been there for about six months, so that rotation involved setting up the lab and building a lot of the really sophisticated equipment that we use. It really gave me exposure to electronics, objects, physics and things that I, as primarily a biologist, never really had a lot of experience with. As a result of that rotation, I decided to join Florian's lab, and that's where I am now. My second year I taught BS52 (Intermolecular Biology) the first semester, which was quite a challenge because I'd never taught an introductory course before. I had taught, as an undergraduate, a biochemistry laboratory course that involved a lot of hands-on work and techniques that I was familiar with, but teaching an intro class with a discussion section to Harvard undergraduates was a challenge. On top of that, I decided to teach two sections of it, so it really kept me busy. The following semester I taught Florian's course, which was MCB 105 (Systems Neuroscience). It was the first year that it was taught, so I had a large role in developing the curriculum. It was an advanced, discussion-based course and we had six students. It was very nice. Then last summer, in July, I took my candidacy exam, which is the big hurdle that you have to get over in the first portion of your graduate study, and that was actually a harrowing experience. Everyone gets stressed out about it. In the end, even though it changed my project dramatically, it was a very, very good experience. So that brings us up to now. I didn't teach last semester, but this semester I'm teaching in John Dowling's Intro to Behavioral Neuroscience course, which is good because it's science that I'm very interested in. Q: In addition to what is going on scientifically, what is the life like in the Engert lab? A: Awesome. Florian is a great person to work for. He's very smart and good at what he does, and he's dedicated. He's also an extremely good teacher, very good at explaining difficult concepts. He was trained as a physicist, but he actually knows quite a bit about biology. What he doesn't know, students and postdocs sort of fill in. But he knows a lot about neurobiology, electrophysiology, and optics. He's also very much hands off--he really wants you to go into the lab and figure things out. My first charge as a rotation student in his lab was to actually build my electrophysiology rig, which was pretty difficult because I had no idea how amplifiers work, or micromanipulators, or even microscopes. I was very much a beginner in this field. He really emphasizes that making mistakes is the best way to learn. And he's always available for consultation if you have problems or questions.
Q: What is a typical day like? A: Mostly I do patch-clamp experiments in vivo. I work on the development of the visual system in the frogs (Xenopus). As I mentioned before, I had to build the electrophysiology setup that I work with now. Typically you go into the lab and make a preparation from a tadpole in vivo. We make in vivo patch-clamp recordings from optic tectal cells, and so a lot of the day is spent recording data. We use a semisophisticated visual stimulus presentation system to directly stimulate the retina and record in the tectum. At the end of the day, after I've collected data from different cells and experiments, I'll sit down at the computer and analyze the data using several different programs. Right now I am trying to map the progression of receptive field development over the course of the life of the tadpole. I'm patching from tadpoles that are at several different developmental stages, trying to ascertain exactly what the receptive field properties are of the tectal cells at that stage. Then I correlate that with the development of the animal as a whole to get a baseline picture of what receptive field development looks like naturally. Then the idea is to use molecular biology to disrupt that system and see if we can change those properties in some way: speed them up or, more likely, slow them down. We do this by dissociating the spike timing from the photo receptors in the eye all the way through to the back of the tectum, trying to ascertain what the specific spike timing-dependent plastic mechanism is, allowing for the refinement of these receptive fields throughout the life of the animal. Essentially, how the visual experience plays a role in developing the visual system. A: I live in Inman Square, it's about a 15-minute walk, which isn't bad. I like where I live. It's a quiet neighborhood, and it has everything I need. I don't have a car, but I don't even have to rely on public transportation to get my groceries, so it's really a nice place to live. I live with two other MCB students in my class and another roommate who is a 9-to-5er. It's been nice because my roommates are interested in science, so we can discuss our projects. We've thought about collaborating, actually. A: I think the department is fairly social. The grad students obviously tend to be more social than the postdocs and faculty, Florian being the exception--he's very social. And there are plenty of opportunities to get together and talk to people. The biggest thing, socially at least, is TGIF, with beer and pizza on Friday nights. In the summer it's volleyball, constant volleyball. You're always seeing people and meeting new people because there's always a pickup game. It slows down in the winter, but in the summer it's very social. It seems like for the most part everyone in the department gets along, and there's no serious animosity or competition between labs. Everyone seems to work together. One of the great things is that the graduate students, at least in my class and in some of the more recent classes, are driven to collaborate with other graduate students or with other labs. There is plenty of opportunity to do that. For instance, you're on the volleyball court and you say, "Oh, so you work for George Whitesides in chemistry? I'm interested doing this sort of nano experiment. Can you listen to what I have to say and maybe see if it's feasible?" Or, "I really need an antibody for such and such protein. You work on this so it's likely that you have this, so can I borrow some from you to try this experiment?" So there really is a great community scientifically as well as socially. Q: What would you say to a prospective grad student about the overall advantages of coming to MCB?
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