The most common form of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease affects more than five million people in the United States. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan first designated November as National Alzheimer’s Disease Awareness Month. To mark the occasion, five NYGC staffers consider their roles in understanding the genetics of (and possibly developing treatments for) Alzheimer’s and other complex neurodegenerative diseases.
Güney Akbalik
Postdoctoral Research Associate, Phatnani Laboratory
Tell us about your current role at the NYGC.
I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Phatnani Lab. I investigate the contribution of mislocalized RNAs to ALS pathology and the selective motor neuron loss using human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC) derived motor neurons from ALS patients. I am also involved in the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) Collaborative Pairs project focusing on understanding whether there is a causal link between macromolecular crowding within a cell and protein aggregation, a hallmark of most of the neurodegenerative diseases. We collaborate with Dr. Liam Holt from NYU for this project.
What do you enjoy doing besides work?
I love sharing my knowledge with young people and the non-scientist community. We live in an age in which people still oppose vaccines and deny scientific facts like climate change. The media also contributes to this misconstruing of the facts. I believe that it is our responsibility as scientists to convey our science in clear, simple language and make it accessible to more lay people.
I am currently a volunteer at a scientific outreach organization called epiSTEM Turkey. We are all academicians, including PhD students, postdocs, and principal investigators (PIs) from all over the world. Our aims are to contribute to the scientific culture, spreading science and encouraging the general public to question facts and think analytically. We want to attract young people and curious minds into science and support them in becoming scientists. We host YouTube events, write easy-to-understand scientific articles, and mentor high school students online every year. I am one of the members of the YouTube team and moderate live YouTube programs. In our programs, we host scientists from various backgrounds, including our members, and let them explain their scientific work in a basic, understandable way. Our followers can ask us live questions. I am also a writer and editor at epiSTEM. I co-mentor two high school students online under our epiSTEM project called “Let’s Do an Experiment”. The students come up with their research ideas and perform low-budget experiments that they can carry out in their home or high school lab. They experience how to be a scientist.
I also love drawing. This summer, I was very lucky to attend the caricature bootcamp classes of legendary artist Steve Brodner at the School of Visual Arts and I want to continue to improve myself. Drawing gives me a free space to use my creativity. In the future, I also want to do scientific illustrations because the visuals are very important to convey ideas and communicate science.
What got you interested in neurodegenerative disease/Alzheimer’s disease research?
My interest in working on ALS comes from a personal place. One of my friends developed ALS years ago and is now the longest living patient with ALS in my home country of Turkey. I know the devastating effects of this disease firsthand, and I am passionate about using my scientific training to work towards understanding the etiology of this disease.
What, if any, barriers or challenges have you faced in your career?
My native language is Turkish. At the beginning of my scientific career, giving presentations in English in front of the scientific community was challenging for me. Fortunately, with time and practice, everything was ok. My second challenge in the past was to deal with individuals who did not know how to collaborate and who put their interests over their team’s work and their colleagues.
What do you think can be done to make the workplace more inclusive and equitable?
Selection criteria to academic workplaces in the world generally favors people who were educated with certain privileges. Students from low-income families might not consider the idea of [science as a career] or even imagine themselves getting a college education. They might want/need to immediately find a job after high school. Reaching out to those communities, trying to understand them, their needs, and restructuring selection criteria for college/workplace admissions might be steps to becoming more inclusive and equitable. We should also have a sociological and historical perspective of the reasons why certain groups have been excluded from economic and social privileges.
What advice would you give to your younger self?
Do not allow anybody or any bad experience to destroy your self-confidence.
Catherine Braine
Graduate Student, Phatnani Laboratory
Tell us about your current role at the NYGC.
I am currently a graduate student in the Neurobiology Program at Columbia where I am co-mentored by Hemali Phatnani and Tom Maniatis. My project focuses on how a particular immune pathway activated in motor neurons and astrocytes in ALS changes their survival. I am currently using spatially resolved RNAseq methods to understand how manipulating this pathway in motor neurons in diseased animals changes their relationship to neighboring cells for better or worse.
What do you enjoy doing besides work?
I’ve made time for my artistic interests; I enjoy needlepoint, watercolor, and costume design. During lockdown I also expanded my cooking repertoire. This past year in particular I’ve made a lot of time to volunteer for Democratic [Party] and social justice campaigns. Fellow graduate students and I run a website called We The Scientists to track the “fact-based” voting records of congresspeople on a variety of science-related legislation. During graduate school I have also volunteered with the Society for Neuroscience to speak to U.S. representatives and senators about the importance of government funding for science—I think this should be part of the duty of all scientists. Scientific funding has become too political, and our job as scientists is to educate the government and public about the vital need for research and funding to support it.
What got you interested in neurodegenerative disease/Alzheimer’s disease research?
I became interested in neurodegenerative disease in college when my grandmother was diagnosed with vascular dementia. I was saddened to learn how few interventions existed for neurodegenerative diseases and this was compounded by watching her decline and the impact it had on my family. During college I volunteered in a research lab and worked on a project tangentially related to Parkinson’s disease. Although I had originally seen myself as a pre-med, I took a research assistant position after college studying glaucoma. Being involved in translational research there solidified my decision to go to graduate school to gain expertise in neurodegenerative disease and genetics.
What, if any, barriers or challenges have you faced in your career?
I am a first-generation college student and before attending college I really had no concept of what it was to conduct academic research. I am grateful to all of the supportive mentors who have given me direction and encouragement along the way. Because of their shared knowledge and inspiration, I went from being a pre-med student (because that career was the path in which science had been directly accessible to me growing up) to following a career path that satisfied my scientific curiosity. It has been not just an education for me, but for my family as well. I don’t think many people outside of academia really know what it means to do research and I think the onus is on the scientific community to educate them.
What do you think can be done to make the workplace more inclusive and equitable?
I think that the creation of forums to discuss the importance of equitable practices is vital. Even though this is kind of hard to achieve in academia, I also think that the adoption of blind hiring practices is important for equitable hiring practices. Finally, I think companies need to have parental leave and childcare subsidies so that female workers aren’t the ones disproportionately impacted by childcare [issues].
What advice would you give to your younger self?
To not give up or be disparaged by negative results in research because science is 99% asking gradual questions and failing upwards to asking the necessary and most relevant question. As someone who has also long suffered from imposter syndrome, I would also tell myself that I deserve to be in all the places I occupy. Also, that you don’t need to be in the lab 25 hours a day to be a “good scientist”—work-life balance is just as important as your data.
Samantha Fennessey
Scientific Project Manager, Project Management
Tell us about your current role at the NYGC.
I am a project manager focused on neurodegenerative disease and COVID-19 research.
What got you interested in neurodegenerative disease/Alzheimer’s disease research?
Admittedly, I didn’t have a strong background in neurodegenerative disease upon joining the Project Management team. Working with the Center for Genomics of Neurodegenerative Disease (CGND) and the ALS Consortium over the last few years, I’ve learned a great deal about the varied progression and presentation of ALS, how much we have yet to understand about the genetics of disease, and the shared pathological mechanisms with Alzheimer’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases. It is exciting to be at the forefront of neurodegenerative and Alzheimer’s disease research, gaining insight into the genetics of neurodegenerative disease and the impact on biology and disease outcomes.
What, if any, barriers or challenges have you faced in your career?
I think an important and continuous challenge in any career is work-life balance.
What do you think can be done to make the workplace more inclusive and equitable?
I think the workplace can be more inclusive and equitable through transparency in hiring and compensation, by creating space for safe and open conversation about issues of diversity and inclusion, and by implementing implicit bias training.
What do you enjoy doing besides work?
I enjoy tennis, running, skiing, hiking, climbing, and nutrition.
What advice would you give to your younger self?
People are more than just one thing— listen, forgive, and don’t judge.
Kunal Pandit
Research Engineer, Technology Innovation
Tell us about your current role at the NYGC.
I’m repurposing a decommissioned Illumina HiSeq 2500 system for spatial-omics techniques. The first thing I’m repurposing the HiSeq to do is image multiplexed protein maps across nervous tissue sections to understand how different cells affect each other in neurodegenerative diseases.
What do you enjoy doing besides work?
My wife and I recently had our first child so besides work I’ve been enjoying our new baby.
What got you interested in neurodegenerative disease/Alzheimer’s disease research?
I was interested in how non-neuronal cells affect neuronal cells in neurodegenerative diseases and developing new technologies to measure and map out that interaction.
What, if any, barriers or challenges have you faced in your career?
My degrees are in chemical engineering, which was classically focused on things like petroleum refinery, but I’ve always been interested in the biological side of it. In grad school it was difficult initially to get placed with a principal investigator (PI) interested in biological problems who used a mix of computational and experimental approaches.
What do you think can be done to make the workplace more inclusive and equitable?
Find and interview a more diverse group of candidates.
What advice would you give to your younger self?
Stop relying on proprietary software and start using/learning open source software.
Joana Petrescu
Student, Phatnani Laboratory
Tell us about your current role at the NYGC.
I am a graduate student in Dr. Hemali Phatnani’s lab, the Center for Genomics of Neurodegenerative Disease (CGND), where I study amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). The goal of my project is to understand how pathology found in the brain post mortem relates to mechanisms of cognitive impairment in ALS-FTD. As a MD-PhD candidate at Columbia University, I am also receiving medical training that will enable me to treat patients.
What do you enjoy doing besides work?
Columbia has a long tradition of student-run clinics that provide healthcare services for medically underserved communities in New York City. This year, I have had the privilege to serve as a co-chair of one of these clinics, the CoSMO behavioral health clinic, which provides mental health services to members of the Washington Heights community regardless of insurance or immigration status. It has been very fulfilling for me to work with my peers and our physician advisors to transition our services to a telehealth model, improve screening protocols for mental health needs, and provide new training opportunities for our student clinicians in order to better serve our patients during the COVID-19 crisis. Outside of this, I have gotten a lot of joy out of exploring NYC on my bike this year.
What got you interested in neurodegenerative disease/Alzheimer’s disease research?
In my personal experience and during my medical training, I have seen how Alzheimer’s and related neurodegenerative diseases can be devastating for patients as well as their loved ones and how current treatment options provide only limited relief. I feel motivated to work towards a better understanding of what causes neurodegenerative disease and, hopefully, how these mechanisms can be targeted for treatment.
What, if any, barriers or challenges have you faced in your career?
When my family immigrated from Romania, we did not speak English, let alone understand the U.S. education system. I have been very lucky to have supportive teachers, advisors, and scientific mentors at every step of my education to encourage me, provide me with research opportunities, and help me understand what some call the “hidden curriculum” of norms in academia. I can say, without a doubt, that I would not be where I am today without the guidance of these pivotal figures in my life and I hope that one day I can provide similar opportunities for future scientists
What do you think can be done to make the workplace more inclusive and equitable?
As someone who did not learn about career options in scientific research until I was in college, I am passionate about providing students, especially students from underrepresented backgrounds, opportunities to explore their interest in science and gain experience in research. I am very proud of the efforts that the CGND has made to host high school and undergraduate students in our lab. I also think it is critically important to continue to support scientists from underrepresented backgrounds at every stage of their careers through equitable and holistic hiring and promotion processes. Overall, I think establishing inclusivity and equity as core values in the scientific community and ensuring that scientific leadership represents diverse backgrounds and viewpoints will make for better science and, ultimately, better outcomes for patients.
What advice would you give to your younger self?
Asking for help doesn’t mean you’re weak or incompetent!
