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Dr. Rachel Bennett is an Assistant Professor in Neurology at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She received her B.S. in Molecular Biology from Arizona State University and her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Washington University in St. Louis. Afterwards, she conducted postdoctoral research at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital before joining the faculty there. Rachel has been named an Outstanding Emerging Scientist by the BrightFocus Foundation, and she received the New Investigator Award from the Charleston Conferences on Alzheimer’s Disease (CCAD). In this interview, she shares more about her life and science.
People Behind the Science Podcast Show Notes
Life Outside of Science (2:42)
Rachel grew up on the West Coast of the U.S. and loved exploring the nearby mountains. This is something she has missed since moving to Boston, MA, so she recently started hiking some of the 48 peaks over 4,000 feet in New Hampshire in her free time. She also enjoys visiting the beautiful beaches nearby. Getting outside is a good reset button for her to recover from the stresses of work in the lab.
The Scientific Side (3:55)
Research in Rachel’s lab focuses on understanding how blood vessels in the brain change in disease and how this might contribute to the loss of neurons in Alzheimer’s disease.
A Dose of Motivation (4:51)
“Do or do not. There is no try.” – Yoda from Star Wars
What Got You Hooked on Science? (8:44)
Around the time Rachel was finishing high school, the Human Genome Project sequenced and published the first human genome. This made a huge impression on Rachel, and she decided to pursue molecular biology at Arizona State University. She was fascinated by the idea of developing gene therapies to cure different diseases. However, through her coursework and undergraduate research experience, she quickly discovered that molecular biology was not a good fit. There was a lot of pipetting clear liquids between tubes, and she didn’t find it particularly satisfying. Rachel pivoted to cell biology, and she fell in love with using different microscopes to see changes as they were occurring in the brain. These interests in visualizing cells in the brain continued during her PhD work where she examined injuries to the axons of neurons in concussion. Seeing images of cells in the microscope was like bringing the figures from her textbooks to life, and Rachel was hooked.
The Low Points: Failures and Challenges (18:17)
About eight years ago when Rachel first started as a postdoc, she was trying to track changes in individual neurons over time. At the time, Rachel did everything she could think of to get the project to work. They used various compounds and dyes to label neurons and the twisted bundles of protein tangles in neurons, but nothing was effective. Rachel got to a point where she had one solution that worked for labeling neurons and one for labeling tangles, but when she tried to use them together, they weren’t compatible. They put the project on the back burner, and Rachel occasionally tried again whenever she saw a new dye available. Every time, her experiments failed. Eventually. a colleague got a different kind of small molecule dye to successfully label the tangles, and they worked together to finally get the project done. They submitted a paper, and it was immediately rejected. With feedback from the reviewers, Rachel and her colleague improved their methods and repeated the entire set of experiments again in a separate model. Even with the new data added, the paper was immediately rejected again. This was devastating because Rachel had invested so much time and effort into the project. After brainstorming with a colleague, Rachel went back to the bench and collected a third set of data, and eventually their revised paper was recently accepted for publication. The paper represents years of struggle, but Rachel is really proud of it, and it opened the door to many more questions to study.
A Shining Success! (24:12)
When she’s not sitting at her desk writing papers and grants, Rachel likes to troubleshoot and help out where she can in the lab. Her lab is one of the groups in a large, open laboratory space shared by multiple investigators. This set-up is great because there are a lot of shared resources, and individual investigators aren’t limited by the equipment and instruments that they can personally afford to purchase for their lab. At the same time, everything gets used a lot, and things often break and need to be fixed. They had this one shaker that Rachel loved because her sample tubes fit in it perfectly. Shakers are tabletop electronic devices with a moving platform that can mix or agitate liquid samples. When her favorite shaker broke, Rachel took it upon herself to open it up, take it apart, clean it, fix it, and put it back together. She was elated when she turned it on, and it actually worked again. This was a small, but particularly meaningful win.
Book Recommendations (25:56)
The Southern Reach Series by Jeff VanderMeer
Most Treasured Travel (26:53)
Rachel had the opportunity to attend the Charleston Conference on Alzheimer’s Disease in Hawai’i for the organization’s big 10th anniversary. It was absolutely remarkable. She went out to snorkel with sea turtles and then, after a short walk on the beach, was sitting in the conference room talking about fascinating science. The meeting was hosted by New Vision Research, a private non-profit that has been supporting and bringing together early-career investigators with a focus on collaboration and networking. The experience was also particularly special because her mom accompanied her on the trip, and they spent some quality time together.
Quirky Traditions and Funny Memories (29:13)
Over the years, Rachel has worked with a really diverse group of colleagues from all over the world, and it has been fun to get to work with people from different backgrounds. At the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging, they have a tradition of sharing recipes at Thanksgiving. They create a new recipe book every year, and it’s cool to see what traditional foods are like for people from other countries and cultures. While Rachel is not the most confident chef, she has enjoyed experimenting with some of the recipes in the book.
Advice For Us All (32:17)
It is critically important to find the right people and form a strong team. Remember that the right people may not necessarily be the ones who appear to be the most qualified candidates on paper. Talk to people, listen to them, and get to know them to help you decide if they are a good fit for your group. Working as a team is fun and is critical to scientific success, because forming the best team will allow you to do the best work and get the best results. Also, if you feel like you are failing, you’re probably doing science right. There is a lot of failure involved in science, and you are not alone. Be persistent, and it will eventually work out.
Guest Bio
Rachel’s research is aimed at understanding why neurons are lost in Alzheimer’s with a focus on studying tau, a protein that aggregates into dense tangles in disease. Using a combination of advanced microscopy tools, MRI methods, and gene expression analysis, her work has recently uncovered the unique impact of tau on blood vessels in the brain and has identified new molecular pathways of Alzheimer’s-related vascular dysfunction. Through these continued explorations, she hopes to develop new treatments that may prevent the loss of neurons in Alzheimer’s. When she’s not in the lab, you can find her hiking one of the 48 peaks over 4k in New Hampshire, relaxing on the beach with her family or reading a science fiction novel with her cat.
Support for this episode of People Behind the Science was provided by Innovative Research, Inc.