November 16, 2023 • 22 mins
Lucina Uddin, PhD, professor-in-residence of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at University of California, Los Angeles, joins John Foxe, PhD, director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience at the University of Rochester for this engaging discussion in NeURoscience Perspectives. Hear her journey to research, how she’s taking on diversity and inclusion in the NIH funded largest long-term study of adolescent brain development (the ABCD Study), and her best advice for aspiring scientists.
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(00:00):
If you're not from the majority group,
(00:02):
you don't see anyone else that looks like you,
you think, well, I'm the odd one out, I must be wrong.
But the truth is, as we've talked about,
the diversity is what drives the innovation in science.
And so when you stick it out, you stick to your,
try to bring people along, I guess, to your perspectives.
And in the long run, it's very satisfying.
(00:25):
The human brain is the most complex structure
in the known universe.
And we are in the middle of a scientific revolution
to understand its inner workings.
Join us for a conversation
with world renowned neuroscientists as they visit Rochester.
I am Dr. John Foxe,
Director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience
at the University of Rochester.
And you are listening to Neuroscience Perspectives.
(00:48):
Hello, and welcome to Neuroscience Perspectives.
I'm John Fox, I'm the Director
of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience
at the University of Rochester.
And I'm delighted to have with me here today,
Professor Lucina Uddin
from the University of California in Los Angeles.
Lucina is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.
(01:09):
And she works with functional neuroimaging
to investigate brain connectivity
and circuit activity in children and adolescents
developing the developing brain
with a concentration also on children
with atypical development and intellectual disabilities.
Lucina, it's really wonderful to have you here.
(01:30):
And let's dive right in.
Before we really get stuck into the science,
I always like to begin by just finding out a little bit
about you and your trajectory.
I know you grew up in California,
but you were born elsewhere.
And do you wanna tell us a little bit
about your trajectory?
Well, I guess how far back do you wanna go?
(01:52):
So I was actually born in Bangladesh.
My parents immigrated to the United States
when I was an infant.
And so it's a pretty typical immigrant story from South Asia.
But I did grow up in Southern California
and I was fortunate enough to be able to come back to home
a couple of years ago
when I joined the psychiatry department at UCLA.
(02:12):
Terrific.
And what took you into science?
Was that a passion in school as a youngster
or is it a later developing thing?
The opposite, in fact.
I was not interested in science.
I was interested in literature and language and arts.
My father has a PhD in comparative literature.
So no science in our home.
It was not something I thought I would be doing.
(02:33):
I did, however, become practically minded
towards the college years
and sort of entered a pre-med major, studied neuroscience.
Mainly because at that age, you don't know what to do.
You look at a list of a hundred majors and you pick one
and being a child of immigrants,
it seemed like, yes, I should be a doctor.
It wasn't a whole lot of thought process that went into it.
(02:55):
But towards the end of my undergraduate years
studying neuroscience,
I really began to just become fascinated with the brain.
Of course, what's not to like, right?
It's one of the most interesting organs.
But realized, of course,
that I was not well-suited to go to medical school
and actually had no interest
in following that particular career path.
(03:15):
Lucky for me, I came to learn
that there's other ways you can engage in science
and one of them is to become a neuroscientist.
So that's what I ended up doing.
Right, well, we won't get into the idea
that the science is practical
and everything else is impractical.
Right, that's not what I meant.
Actually, it's just myself, I studied it.
When I started my studies, it was in literature
(03:37):
and I came to science quite late in life myself.
And I think it makes for an interesting trajectory.
So your parents, your dad was an academic.
So that must have been an influence
on sort of choosing the academic life.
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, just even realizing that one can get a PhD
and specialize on a topic
and study it for the rest of their lives,
(03:59):
I think it's not always understood
that that's a career path.
So I think especially for people
coming from other countries,
they kind of want stability, economic stability.
And that's sort of one path to that
is to go into a field like science, engineering or medicine.
So I think it's really,
(04:19):
I think I appreciate having that kind of background
to sort of draw from in terms of thinking about
when I mentor students from all over the world,
kind of having an understanding
of where they might be coming from might be different
than growing up in a middle-class American family,
for example.
I hadn't intended to ask you this,
(04:39):
but let's stay with this interface
coming from the humanities into science.
Sure.
Do you bring that into your science
or did you leave it behind you?
Oh, I bring it.
I mean, I'm a huge reader.
I love writing and literature to this day.
I read at least one novel a month,
really into fiction and sci-fi.
But I think what people don't realize
is that a career in science
(05:00):
requires so much writing and communication.
And that's something you develop really very much so
in the humanities.
You learn to write, you learn to communicate,
you learn to convey complex ideas to a wide audience
and to really engage and bring people in.
Why are we doing this?
What makes it important?
What's the significance?
(05:20):
How does it help us understand the human condition?
These are what the humanities train you for.
So I think, you know, I never meant to say,
oh, that wasn't practical.
I think, in fact, all of that training, you know,
helped me become the scientist that I am.
I completely agree.
I mean, you could have the greatest finding idea in the world,
but if you can't turn it into words
that you can communicate to people with,
(05:41):
it may as well not exist.
Exactly.
My PhD advisor actually said that
if you did a study and didn't publish it,
it's as if you didn't do it
because no one knows what you did.
Very good.
That's terrific.
I really, I think that's great advice actually
to graduate students that don't neglect that side of life.
I actually have lived by a maxim myself,
(06:02):
which is if I don't have a place in my life
for a book that's not related to the job,
my life is out of balance.
That's true.
Well, there's two things that I want to talk about.
One, obviously I want to get into the functional imaging
and how you approach your science.
And the other piece, you know,
that our audience should know about is,
you know, you have a very specific devotion
to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the sciences,
(06:26):
and you've put a big chunk of your career
into that and won awards for in that space.
Well, we'll get to talk about that, I think, shortly,
but let's do the science piece first.
You use big magnets.
Yes.
Right, do you want to tell us a little bit about that
and what it means and how you approach it?
Those of us who want to study the human brain,
unfortunately we have few options
because we can't do a lot of that really nice invasive work
(06:50):
that our colleagues do and who work on animal models.
So we can't do quite as much manipulation.
We can't do quite as much of getting into,
you know, cellular mechanisms
because we're confined by what you can do to human subjects.
So I've been working in magnetic resonance imaging
since I was a PhD student, so I guess 20 years now.
(07:11):
And we can, you know, of course,
non-invasively look at the brain
when people are doing certain things.
We can look at their brain when they're doing nothing at all,
which is something that's become very interesting
in the last few years.
So yeah, I've been trying to sort of push the limits
of what we can do with this magnetic resonance imaging
technology because we're learning more and more about sort of,
(07:32):
it's not just, you know, input comes into the brain
and the brain does something and produces some output,
but it turns out there's a lot of spontaneous activity
in the brain and we're only now just beginning to understand
how that constrains function, constrains behavior,
how it shapes kind of what we do.
I think this is just a fascinating area
that my love has been thinking a lot about,
(07:54):
this intrinsic activity, spontaneous activity.
What does it mean?
You know, what's it there for and how can we use it
to better understand brain function?
So this idea that there are brain states,
that the networks are active in a certain way
when things are good and that you can even just image
the brain at rest and understand when things are awry
(08:14):
or off kilter or the networks aren't working well.
And give us something, like give us a nugget of an insight
that we've gained from this.
Yeah, I mean, I think people were surprised to find
how coherent this activity is and how you can find it
in individuals over time.
Like for example, in your brain and my brain,
we can find similar looking networks,
(08:35):
even in this, what we call resting state,
when we're not in, even if we're just lying there,
not doing anything at all, we would still be showing
spontaneous, coherent, low frequency activity
in what you might call a motor network
or a language network or a visual network.
Those are regions of the brain that would be cooperating
if we were doing a motor task or a visual task
or a language task.
It turns out they're just kind of spontaneously going,
(08:58):
they're just going in loops all the time.
And you can find them in individuals,
you can find that they change over the lifespan,
you can find some kind of signature alterations
in some developmental conditions.
It's just a whole new way of thinking about brain function
that I think has really produced a lot of insights.
And I suppose a magic power to this particular technique
then is that you don't have, if you have children
(09:20):
and you're very concentrated on development
who can't answer a question or can't perform a complex task,
it doesn't put a huge demand on that.
You can actually look at function
without having people doing somersaults for us.
That's right, yeah.
You can just have someone say, lay still for five minutes.
And if you can get them to do that,
you can actually collect this data,
(09:42):
which tells you so much information
about brain organization.
And gives it a clinical tractability component too.
That's right.
That's really interesting.
I happen to know, of course,
that you are very involved with one of the,
I think maybe the biggest study that NIH has ever,
the National Institute of Health
has ever really undertaken the ABCD study,
(10:02):
Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study,
which is a mouthful.
Tell us a little bit about that
and what your hopes and aspirations are for it.
Yeah, and I assume you're also very involved.
Yes, indeed.
But yeah, this study that NIH has been funding now
for close to 10 years has started with nine and 10 year olds
and a huge group of them,
(10:23):
over 10,000 nine and 10 year olds,
who came in and the data were collected
across 21 sites all over the United States.
So the idea was to get people from all over the place
and just follow them up yearly with brain imaging measures
and cognitive measures and behavioral measures
with ultimate goal of trying to predict susceptibility,
risk and resilience to substance abuse
(10:44):
and mental health disorders across this adolescent period.
So it's just enormous, as you can imagine,
both as a data collection effort
and as a data dissemination effort
and as a data analysis effort.
So for years now, NIH has been sort of releasing the data
to the public for researchers to use
to answer all of these questions.
(11:05):
And that is key.
This is a very important piece, right?
The model has changed here.
As scientists, we collected data in our labs,
we kept it, we huddled around it,
we kept it for ourselves.
Horted it.
Horted it, it was precious commodity.
But this is a change in the model.
Do you wanna talk about open science
and what our hopes for that are?
I mean, open science is huge.
The idea that the data that scientists collect
(11:27):
should be made available for other scientists to use
and answer whatever questions that they want to answer.
This is huge.
I actually started my lab about 10 years ago
when this really took off.
It used to be sort of unheard of that people would say,
hey, I spent the last five years and $5 million
collecting this data, here, you have it.
But now it's actually mandated
(11:49):
by the National Institute of Health to say,
okay, you've spent all this effort, great.
Now let's see what others can do with it as well.
And it brings the kind of collaboration
that really benefits all of us
because then you get computer scientists,
electrical engineers, physicists sometimes,
people coming with new approaches.
You get people in other fields
(12:11):
just being able to work collaboratively
with the people who have collected the data.
And it just gets extra complicated
and extra nuanced as a result.
But I think this is the future of science.
And I suppose there's two important distinctions.
One is you mentioned $5 million,
which is not atypical.
That $5 million comes from the American taxpayer.
(12:32):
That's right.
And they want value for money, right?
So having those data looked at by one mind
is nothing like having it looked at by
all the brilliant minds that could potentially leverage it.
That's right.
But another piece, and then this goes to
what I wanna talk to you about next,
which is the diversity and inclusion,
is there are many people who don't live
(12:53):
at a major academic center like
the University of California in Los Angeles
or the University of Rochester
where we have phenomenal resources.
But there are great scientists and great minds out there
at smaller places that don't have those resources
that can't get data like these.
So this provides that opportunity for them.
Exactly, right.
Yeah, that's what it did for me
because I started my lab at the University of Miami
(13:14):
where they were just starting
a neuroimaging center at the time.
So while I was waiting for things to pick up,
getting our scanner going, everybody's writing grants,
during that time I was able to analyze a lot of data sets
that have been made available
through these open science efforts.
One of them was called
the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange, ABIDE.
And so that's another one where researchers
(13:34):
across the world really were putting their data together
in one place and you could download it,
you could use it to look at brain connectivity
and its development in autism,
which is what I did for many years in the beginning,
while waiting for our own grants to start,
while waiting and doing our own data collection.
So it really has just changed,
I think, the way people do science now.
You just see more and more of these large data,
(13:56):
and not to mention the statistical power,
the increase you get with looking at hundreds of subjects
instead of looking at tens of subjects.
So it's just been a win-win.
It has.
And it's a nice segue into this issue of diversity
because another key component of the ABCD study, right,
in the old days, an investigator would do
a functional imaging study,
(14:17):
at best they'd have 20 or 30 people in there
and they probably all came from the local school, right?
Or some organization, somebody's book club,
but ABCD changes that, right?
Do you wanna speak to that?
Well, it tries very hard to match
the racial and ethnic diversity
that we have in the United States.
So it tries very hard to sort of get the percentages right.
(14:40):
And that brings with it extra challenges
because trying to get into,
get participants who maybe don't have as many resources
to say, hey, I'm gonna give you five hours out of my day
to do a study, it's a different set of challenges
than saying getting a college student to come in to do a study.
So this project is funny because I'm a newcomer to ABCD myself.
(15:02):
So I joined UCLA two years ago
and sort of was immediately sucked into this world
of this big grant.
And then just a year ago,
I was appointed as the Associate Director
for Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusivity
for all of ABCD, which means now I'm talking with everybody,
all the 21 sites looking at
what their local recruitment efforts are,
(15:23):
what are the difficulties they're having with retention,
especially from participants in minoritized populations.
All of, lots of issues related to justice, equity,
diversity, and inclusivity in all of the study
have now sort of fallen under my umbrella.
And now I have a team of individuals who I work with
to sort of spread the Jedi efforts
(15:44):
all throughout the consortium.
So that has been quite an interesting challenge.
It's a tour de force and a real challenge
because I suppose, you know,
having been early enough into, in the ABCD,
you know, people started out with the best intentions.
Of course.
But of course, I don't think we had a real appreciation
(16:05):
for the true barriers that are right there
for people who come from hardscrabble backgrounds,
who have, don't have the economic means
for them to stay involved in the study,
the mobility in those communities,
the lack of a bus fare.
This comes down to such basic simple things
that militate against participation
and how intentional we need to be as a community.
(16:27):
Yeah, yeah.
It's, for me, it's been a whirlwind tour
of just learning while trying to do justice to this role,
which I think was very forward thinking
for the directors to say,
hey, we actually need an entire person devoted to thinking
about these issues, an entire team
that's now funded to do that.
So, you know, we've talked a lot
throughout our symposium today about how the funding,
(16:51):
you know, bodies like National Institute of Health
can help us think this way to be more inclusive
in our science.
And we just had wonderful presentations already about this.
But part of it is just as simple as money.
Have you provided, you know,
means for transportation or meals during this, you know,
things that make it easier for people to go to child care,
even if they have other children who need, you know, care,
(17:13):
and they want to bring in their adolescent to the study,
maybe we have to provide means for that as well.
So, I mean, just thinking these issues through
is a big step.
Right, and taking off hours of a work day for, you know,
when you're a professional who can get time off,
but if you're a shift worker, you know, it's-
It's hard.
You know, we were talking about best intentions,
(17:33):
but at the end of the day,
you have to actually deploy resources
and human power and knowledge.
And I think, you know, you're at the point,
the end of the stick on this.
And I think as an ABCD investigator,
we really appreciate what you and the team are doing.
No, it's a tall order,
and that's why we really need buy-in from everybody.
And that's part of what it is,
(17:54):
is that everyone at ABCD and studies like this,
we've all realized we don't live in a academic ivory
tower bubble, or maybe we do,
but if we want to really make the kind of impact
that we are hoping to make,
we just have to take all of these factors
into consideration.
And I mean, just coming back to where we started,
does your Bangladeshi background,
(18:15):
your immigrant background,
do you feel like that's helped you in this role?
I mean, for sure.
I think part of what we're combating now
is also this idea of medical mistrust,
or just mistrust in science.
And there's a lot of reasons why some communities
would not want to come in and participate
in a research study.
And it helps me to understand some of that.
I can tell you, like, as an immigrant,
(18:36):
we only became citizens, you know,
through the naturalization process.
And you may not want to, you know,
to reveal to an institution what your immigration status is
in the United States, contentious issues.
And there's a lot of things going on right now
with sexual and gender minorities in some states
in the United States where it's becoming more
and more dangerous for those individuals to exist.
(18:57):
And so, I mean, our study,
we might ask these questions that some people
are even afraid to answer.
So, you know, just being sensitive to, you know,
like, the things we're asking, we're doing this
because we want to help these communities,
but at the same time, we have to build trust
with the communities so that they know,
hey, we're doing this for you, not, you know,
it's for some nefarious purpose.
(19:18):
Right, right, right.
And I would say, there's a saying, right,
you know, the strength of science is in its diverse minds
and bringing people from different backgrounds together.
And I personally believe that's one of the great achievements
of the American science engine is that it took minds
and brilliance from wherever it could get it.
And I rue the day that they would decide not to do that
(19:40):
because that is what's driven innovation in this country.
Now, you know, I really appreciate that.
I appreciate you wading into
what is difficult political territory.
It's not easy to talk about.
I always like to close with this question, you know,
for youngsters up and coming, you know,
you've traveled a certain path, you know,
from an immigrant family of the humanities and so on.
(20:03):
When you turn around and you talk to your graduate students
or even if you're out in the school system,
what do you say to youngsters?
What do you say about, you know,
do you have some nuggets tips for life?
For life? Oh, wow.
Or the academy?
It's interesting because I was not by any means
a traditional success story.
(20:24):
I think it took a long time for me to get off the ground.
I mean, in terms of, you know,
I was a postdoc for something like seven years,
which may be more typical nowadays,
but just a larger commentary on academia in general.
But, you know, I didn't think that I would succeed
in this career path.
There was no indication I would for many, many years.
I struggled.
(20:44):
I didn't get my first faculty position
until, you know, about 10 years ago.
It's a lot of investment that you put in,
not sort of knowing what will come out the other end,
but, you know, and people will give you all kinds of advice,
but it's kind of the survivorship bias.
Like this worked for me.
That doesn't necessarily mean it'll work for anybody else.
But one thing that I found that I couldn't move away from
(21:07):
was this kind of like, I have a unique perspective
and I'm just gonna keep doing the thing
that I think needs to be done,
whether it's looking at spontaneous brain activity
when nobody else cared about that,
or, you know, whether it's, you know,
looking at certain populations using, you know,
certain approaches.
I have a unique perspective and I'm gonna be here
and I'm gonna bring that perspective to academia,
whether they want it or not.
(21:29):
It turns out eventually they do want it because, you know,
sometimes if you're not from the majority group,
you don't see anyone else that looks like you,
you think, well, I'm the odd one out.
I must be wrong.
But the truth is, you know, that as we've talked about,
you know, the diversity is what like drives
the innovation in science.
And so when you, you know, you stick it out,
(21:49):
you stick to your, you know, try to bring people along,
I guess, to your perspectives.
And in the long run, it's very satisfying,
but it is a uphill battle.
And the only thing that sort of keeps you going
is the mentors and allies and friends and collaborators
that you meet along the way who support you in that path.
So there's the, both sort of don't lose your hope,
(22:11):
even though it sometimes looks bleak,
but also like rely on those friends and connections
and collaborations because that's what makes it all possible
and worthwhile.
That's fantastic.
You know, we hear this again and again,
when I ask this question, mentors,
the people that give you a leg up in life.
And what I hear is perseverance,
single-mindedness and hard work.
(22:32):
Well, the mentors and it's true,
you can't do it without mentors, colleagues, friends.
Lucina, thank you very much for taking time out.
It's really been a pleasure to chat with you
and to introduce you to our audience.
Thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
Awesome.
it's amazing.
If you're not from the majority group,
(00:02):
you don't see anyone else that looks like you,
you think, well, I'm the odd one out, I must be wrong.
But the truth is, as we've talked about,
the diversity is what drives the innovation in science.
And so when you stick it out, you stick to your,
try to bring people along, I guess, to your perspectives.
And in the long run, it's very satisfying.
(00:25):
The human brain is the most complex structure
in the known universe.
And we are in the middle of a scientific revolution
to understand its inner workings.
Join us for a conversation
with world renowned neuroscientists as they visit Rochester.
I am Dr. John Foxe,
Director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience
at the University of Rochester.
And you are listening to Neuroscience Perspectives.
(00:48):
Hello, and welcome to Neuroscience Perspectives.
I'm John Fox, I'm the Director
of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience
at the University of Rochester.
And I'm delighted to have with me here today,
Professor Lucina Uddin
from the University of California in Los Angeles.
Lucina is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences.
(01:09):
And she works with functional neuroimaging
to investigate brain connectivity
and circuit activity in children and adolescents
developing the developing brain
with a concentration also on children
with atypical development and intellectual disabilities.
Lucina, it's really wonderful to have you here.
(01:30):
And let's dive right in.
Before we really get stuck into the science,
I always like to begin by just finding out a little bit
about you and your trajectory.
I know you grew up in California,
but you were born elsewhere.
And do you wanna tell us a little bit
about your trajectory?
Well, I guess how far back do you wanna go?
(01:52):
So I was actually born in Bangladesh.
My parents immigrated to the United States
when I was an infant.
And so it's a pretty typical immigrant story from South Asia.
But I did grow up in Southern California
and I was fortunate enough to be able to come back to home
a couple of years ago
when I joined the psychiatry department at UCLA.
(02:12):
Terrific.
And what took you into science?
Was that a passion in school as a youngster
or is it a later developing thing?
The opposite, in fact.
I was not interested in science.
I was interested in literature and language and arts.
My father has a PhD in comparative literature.
So no science in our home.
It was not something I thought I would be doing.
(02:33):
I did, however, become practically minded
towards the college years
and sort of entered a pre-med major, studied neuroscience.
Mainly because at that age, you don't know what to do.
You look at a list of a hundred majors and you pick one
and being a child of immigrants,
it seemed like, yes, I should be a doctor.
It wasn't a whole lot of thought process that went into it.
(02:55):
But towards the end of my undergraduate years
studying neuroscience,
I really began to just become fascinated with the brain.
Of course, what's not to like, right?
It's one of the most interesting organs.
But realized, of course,
that I was not well-suited to go to medical school
and actually had no interest
in following that particular career path.
(03:15):
Lucky for me, I came to learn
that there's other ways you can engage in science
and one of them is to become a neuroscientist.
So that's what I ended up doing.
Right, well, we won't get into the idea
that the science is practical
and everything else is impractical.
Right, that's not what I meant.
Actually, it's just myself, I studied it.
When I started my studies, it was in literature
(03:37):
and I came to science quite late in life myself.
And I think it makes for an interesting trajectory.
So your parents, your dad was an academic.
So that must have been an influence
on sort of choosing the academic life.
Yeah, I think so.
I mean, just even realizing that one can get a PhD
and specialize on a topic
and study it for the rest of their lives,
(03:59):
I think it's not always understood
that that's a career path.
So I think especially for people
coming from other countries,
they kind of want stability, economic stability.
And that's sort of one path to that
is to go into a field like science, engineering or medicine.
So I think it's really,
(04:19):
I think I appreciate having that kind of background
to sort of draw from in terms of thinking about
when I mentor students from all over the world,
kind of having an understanding
of where they might be coming from might be different
than growing up in a middle-class American family,
for example.
I hadn't intended to ask you this,
(04:39):
but let's stay with this interface
coming from the humanities into science.
Sure.
Do you bring that into your science
or did you leave it behind you?
Oh, I bring it.
I mean, I'm a huge reader.
I love writing and literature to this day.
I read at least one novel a month,
really into fiction and sci-fi.
But I think what people don't realize
is that a career in science
(05:00):
requires so much writing and communication.
And that's something you develop really very much so
in the humanities.
You learn to write, you learn to communicate,
you learn to convey complex ideas to a wide audience
and to really engage and bring people in.
Why are we doing this?
What makes it important?
What's the significance?
(05:20):
How does it help us understand the human condition?
These are what the humanities train you for.
So I think, you know, I never meant to say,
oh, that wasn't practical.
I think, in fact, all of that training, you know,
helped me become the scientist that I am.
I completely agree.
I mean, you could have the greatest finding idea in the world,
but if you can't turn it into words
that you can communicate to people with,
(05:41):
it may as well not exist.
Exactly.
My PhD advisor actually said that
if you did a study and didn't publish it,
it's as if you didn't do it
because no one knows what you did.
Very good.
That's terrific.
I really, I think that's great advice actually
to graduate students that don't neglect that side of life.
I actually have lived by a maxim myself,
(06:02):
which is if I don't have a place in my life
for a book that's not related to the job,
my life is out of balance.
That's true.
Well, there's two things that I want to talk about.
One, obviously I want to get into the functional imaging
and how you approach your science.
And the other piece, you know,
that our audience should know about is,
you know, you have a very specific devotion
to diversity, equity, and inclusion in the sciences,
(06:26):
and you've put a big chunk of your career
into that and won awards for in that space.
Well, we'll get to talk about that, I think, shortly,
but let's do the science piece first.
You use big magnets.
Yes.
Right, do you want to tell us a little bit about that
and what it means and how you approach it?
Those of us who want to study the human brain,
unfortunately we have few options
because we can't do a lot of that really nice invasive work
(06:50):
that our colleagues do and who work on animal models.
So we can't do quite as much manipulation.
We can't do quite as much of getting into,
you know, cellular mechanisms
because we're confined by what you can do to human subjects.
So I've been working in magnetic resonance imaging
since I was a PhD student, so I guess 20 years now.
(07:11):
And we can, you know, of course,
non-invasively look at the brain
when people are doing certain things.
We can look at their brain when they're doing nothing at all,
which is something that's become very interesting
in the last few years.
So yeah, I've been trying to sort of push the limits
of what we can do with this magnetic resonance imaging
technology because we're learning more and more about sort of,
(07:32):
it's not just, you know, input comes into the brain
and the brain does something and produces some output,
but it turns out there's a lot of spontaneous activity
in the brain and we're only now just beginning to understand
how that constrains function, constrains behavior,
how it shapes kind of what we do.
I think this is just a fascinating area
that my love has been thinking a lot about,
(07:54):
this intrinsic activity, spontaneous activity.
What does it mean?
You know, what's it there for and how can we use it
to better understand brain function?
So this idea that there are brain states,
that the networks are active in a certain way
when things are good and that you can even just image
the brain at rest and understand when things are awry
(08:14):
or off kilter or the networks aren't working well.
And give us something, like give us a nugget of an insight
that we've gained from this.
Yeah, I mean, I think people were surprised to find
how coherent this activity is and how you can find it
in individuals over time.
Like for example, in your brain and my brain,
we can find similar looking networks,
(08:35):
even in this, what we call resting state,
when we're not in, even if we're just lying there,
not doing anything at all, we would still be showing
spontaneous, coherent, low frequency activity
in what you might call a motor network
or a language network or a visual network.
Those are regions of the brain that would be cooperating
if we were doing a motor task or a visual task
or a language task.
It turns out they're just kind of spontaneously going,
(08:58):
they're just going in loops all the time.
And you can find them in individuals,
you can find that they change over the lifespan,
you can find some kind of signature alterations
in some developmental conditions.
It's just a whole new way of thinking about brain function
that I think has really produced a lot of insights.
And I suppose a magic power to this particular technique
then is that you don't have, if you have children
(09:20):
and you're very concentrated on development
who can't answer a question or can't perform a complex task,
it doesn't put a huge demand on that.
You can actually look at function
without having people doing somersaults for us.
That's right, yeah.
You can just have someone say, lay still for five minutes.
And if you can get them to do that,
you can actually collect this data,
(09:42):
which tells you so much information
about brain organization.
And gives it a clinical tractability component too.
That's right.
That's really interesting.
I happen to know, of course,
that you are very involved with one of the,
I think maybe the biggest study that NIH has ever,
the National Institute of Health
has ever really undertaken the ABCD study,
(10:02):
Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study,
which is a mouthful.
Tell us a little bit about that
and what your hopes and aspirations are for it.
Yeah, and I assume you're also very involved.
Yes, indeed.
But yeah, this study that NIH has been funding now
for close to 10 years has started with nine and 10 year olds
and a huge group of them,
(10:23):
over 10,000 nine and 10 year olds,
who came in and the data were collected
across 21 sites all over the United States.
So the idea was to get people from all over the place
and just follow them up yearly with brain imaging measures
and cognitive measures and behavioral measures
with ultimate goal of trying to predict susceptibility,
risk and resilience to substance abuse
(10:44):
and mental health disorders across this adolescent period.
So it's just enormous, as you can imagine,
both as a data collection effort
and as a data dissemination effort
and as a data analysis effort.
So for years now, NIH has been sort of releasing the data
to the public for researchers to use
to answer all of these questions.
(11:05):
And that is key.
This is a very important piece, right?
The model has changed here.
As scientists, we collected data in our labs,
we kept it, we huddled around it,
we kept it for ourselves.
Horted it.
Horted it, it was precious commodity.
But this is a change in the model.
Do you wanna talk about open science
and what our hopes for that are?
I mean, open science is huge.
The idea that the data that scientists collect
(11:27):
should be made available for other scientists to use
and answer whatever questions that they want to answer.
This is huge.
I actually started my lab about 10 years ago
when this really took off.
It used to be sort of unheard of that people would say,
hey, I spent the last five years and $5 million
collecting this data, here, you have it.
But now it's actually mandated
(11:49):
by the National Institute of Health to say,
okay, you've spent all this effort, great.
Now let's see what others can do with it as well.
And it brings the kind of collaboration
that really benefits all of us
because then you get computer scientists,
electrical engineers, physicists sometimes,
people coming with new approaches.
You get people in other fields
(12:11):
just being able to work collaboratively
with the people who have collected the data.
And it just gets extra complicated
and extra nuanced as a result.
But I think this is the future of science.
And I suppose there's two important distinctions.
One is you mentioned $5 million,
which is not atypical.
That $5 million comes from the American taxpayer.
(12:32):
That's right.
And they want value for money, right?
So having those data looked at by one mind
is nothing like having it looked at by
all the brilliant minds that could potentially leverage it.
That's right.
But another piece, and then this goes to
what I wanna talk to you about next,
which is the diversity and inclusion,
is there are many people who don't live
(12:53):
at a major academic center like
the University of California in Los Angeles
or the University of Rochester
where we have phenomenal resources.
But there are great scientists and great minds out there
at smaller places that don't have those resources
that can't get data like these.
So this provides that opportunity for them.
Exactly, right.
Yeah, that's what it did for me
because I started my lab at the University of Miami
(13:14):
where they were just starting
a neuroimaging center at the time.
So while I was waiting for things to pick up,
getting our scanner going, everybody's writing grants,
during that time I was able to analyze a lot of data sets
that have been made available
through these open science efforts.
One of them was called
the Autism Brain Imaging Data Exchange, ABIDE.
And so that's another one where researchers
(13:34):
across the world really were putting their data together
in one place and you could download it,
you could use it to look at brain connectivity
and its development in autism,
which is what I did for many years in the beginning,
while waiting for our own grants to start,
while waiting and doing our own data collection.
So it really has just changed,
I think, the way people do science now.
You just see more and more of these large data,
(13:56):
and not to mention the statistical power,
the increase you get with looking at hundreds of subjects
instead of looking at tens of subjects.
So it's just been a win-win.
It has.
And it's a nice segue into this issue of diversity
because another key component of the ABCD study, right,
in the old days, an investigator would do
a functional imaging study,
(14:17):
at best they'd have 20 or 30 people in there
and they probably all came from the local school, right?
Or some organization, somebody's book club,
but ABCD changes that, right?
Do you wanna speak to that?
Well, it tries very hard to match
the racial and ethnic diversity
that we have in the United States.
So it tries very hard to sort of get the percentages right.
(14:40):
And that brings with it extra challenges
because trying to get into,
get participants who maybe don't have as many resources
to say, hey, I'm gonna give you five hours out of my day
to do a study, it's a different set of challenges
than saying getting a college student to come in to do a study.
So this project is funny because I'm a newcomer to ABCD myself.
(15:02):
So I joined UCLA two years ago
and sort of was immediately sucked into this world
of this big grant.
And then just a year ago,
I was appointed as the Associate Director
for Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusivity
for all of ABCD, which means now I'm talking with everybody,
all the 21 sites looking at
what their local recruitment efforts are,
(15:23):
what are the difficulties they're having with retention,
especially from participants in minoritized populations.
All of, lots of issues related to justice, equity,
diversity, and inclusivity in all of the study
have now sort of fallen under my umbrella.
And now I have a team of individuals who I work with
to sort of spread the Jedi efforts
(15:44):
all throughout the consortium.
So that has been quite an interesting challenge.
It's a tour de force and a real challenge
because I suppose, you know,
having been early enough into, in the ABCD,
you know, people started out with the best intentions.
Of course.
But of course, I don't think we had a real appreciation
(16:05):
for the true barriers that are right there
for people who come from hardscrabble backgrounds,
who have, don't have the economic means
for them to stay involved in the study,
the mobility in those communities,
the lack of a bus fare.
This comes down to such basic simple things
that militate against participation
and how intentional we need to be as a community.
(16:27):
Yeah, yeah.
It's, for me, it's been a whirlwind tour
of just learning while trying to do justice to this role,
which I think was very forward thinking
for the directors to say,
hey, we actually need an entire person devoted to thinking
about these issues, an entire team
that's now funded to do that.
So, you know, we've talked a lot
throughout our symposium today about how the funding,
(16:51):
you know, bodies like National Institute of Health
can help us think this way to be more inclusive
in our science.
And we just had wonderful presentations already about this.
But part of it is just as simple as money.
Have you provided, you know,
means for transportation or meals during this, you know,
things that make it easier for people to go to child care,
even if they have other children who need, you know, care,
(17:13):
and they want to bring in their adolescent to the study,
maybe we have to provide means for that as well.
So, I mean, just thinking these issues through
is a big step.
Right, and taking off hours of a work day for, you know,
when you're a professional who can get time off,
but if you're a shift worker, you know, it's-
It's hard.
You know, we were talking about best intentions,
(17:33):
but at the end of the day,
you have to actually deploy resources
and human power and knowledge.
And I think, you know, you're at the point,
the end of the stick on this.
And I think as an ABCD investigator,
we really appreciate what you and the team are doing.
No, it's a tall order,
and that's why we really need buy-in from everybody.
And that's part of what it is,
(17:54):
is that everyone at ABCD and studies like this,
we've all realized we don't live in a academic ivory
tower bubble, or maybe we do,
but if we want to really make the kind of impact
that we are hoping to make,
we just have to take all of these factors
into consideration.
And I mean, just coming back to where we started,
does your Bangladeshi background,
(18:15):
your immigrant background,
do you feel like that's helped you in this role?
I mean, for sure.
I think part of what we're combating now
is also this idea of medical mistrust,
or just mistrust in science.
And there's a lot of reasons why some communities
would not want to come in and participate
in a research study.
And it helps me to understand some of that.
I can tell you, like, as an immigrant,
(18:36):
we only became citizens, you know,
through the naturalization process.
And you may not want to, you know,
to reveal to an institution what your immigration status is
in the United States, contentious issues.
And there's a lot of things going on right now
with sexual and gender minorities in some states
in the United States where it's becoming more
and more dangerous for those individuals to exist.
(18:57):
And so, I mean, our study,
we might ask these questions that some people
are even afraid to answer.
So, you know, just being sensitive to, you know,
like, the things we're asking, we're doing this
because we want to help these communities,
but at the same time, we have to build trust
with the communities so that they know,
hey, we're doing this for you, not, you know,
it's for some nefarious purpose.
(19:18):
Right, right, right.
And I would say, there's a saying, right,
you know, the strength of science is in its diverse minds
and bringing people from different backgrounds together.
And I personally believe that's one of the great achievements
of the American science engine is that it took minds
and brilliance from wherever it could get it.
And I rue the day that they would decide not to do that
(19:40):
because that is what's driven innovation in this country.
Now, you know, I really appreciate that.
I appreciate you wading into
what is difficult political territory.
It's not easy to talk about.
I always like to close with this question, you know,
for youngsters up and coming, you know,
you've traveled a certain path, you know,
from an immigrant family of the humanities and so on.
(20:03):
When you turn around and you talk to your graduate students
or even if you're out in the school system,
what do you say to youngsters?
What do you say about, you know,
do you have some nuggets tips for life?
For life? Oh, wow.
Or the academy?
It's interesting because I was not by any means
a traditional success story.
(20:24):
I think it took a long time for me to get off the ground.
I mean, in terms of, you know,
I was a postdoc for something like seven years,
which may be more typical nowadays,
but just a larger commentary on academia in general.
But, you know, I didn't think that I would succeed
in this career path.
There was no indication I would for many, many years.
I struggled.
(20:44):
I didn't get my first faculty position
until, you know, about 10 years ago.
It's a lot of investment that you put in,
not sort of knowing what will come out the other end,
but, you know, and people will give you all kinds of advice,
but it's kind of the survivorship bias.
Like this worked for me.
That doesn't necessarily mean it'll work for anybody else.
But one thing that I found that I couldn't move away from
(21:07):
was this kind of like, I have a unique perspective
and I'm just gonna keep doing the thing
that I think needs to be done,
whether it's looking at spontaneous brain activity
when nobody else cared about that,
or, you know, whether it's, you know,
looking at certain populations using, you know,
certain approaches.
I have a unique perspective and I'm gonna be here
and I'm gonna bring that perspective to academia,
whether they want it or not.
(21:29):
It turns out eventually they do want it because, you know,
sometimes if you're not from the majority group,
you don't see anyone else that looks like you,
you think, well, I'm the odd one out.
I must be wrong.
But the truth is, you know, that as we've talked about,
you know, the diversity is what like drives
the innovation in science.
And so when you, you know, you stick it out,
(21:49):
you stick to your, you know, try to bring people along,
I guess, to your perspectives.
And in the long run, it's very satisfying,
but it is a uphill battle.
And the only thing that sort of keeps you going
is the mentors and allies and friends and collaborators
that you meet along the way who support you in that path.
So there's the, both sort of don't lose your hope,
(22:11):
even though it sometimes looks bleak,
but also like rely on those friends and connections
and collaborations because that's what makes it all possible
and worthwhile.
That's fantastic.
You know, we hear this again and again,
when I ask this question, mentors,
the people that give you a leg up in life.
And what I hear is perseverance,
single-mindedness and hard work.
(22:32):
Well, the mentors and it's true,
you can't do it without mentors, colleagues, friends.
Lucina, thank you very much for taking time out.
It's really been a pleasure to chat with you
and to introduce you to our audience.
Thank you.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you so much.
Awesome.
it's amazing.
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