On the Brain
Ask a Queer Neuroscientist
Hi lovelies. First, my apologies for taking so long to get this interview out. I got ghosted by a few prospective interviewees and needed to regroup. As I was regrouping, I saw a tweet from one of my mutuals and thought: “Hey, he’s a scientist. I can talk to him!”
Yesenia Garcia-Sifuentes (he/they) describes himself as a “first-generation Mexican non-binary scientist.” He studies and does his research at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. I don’t want to spoil too much in the header but his research is super interesting and cool.
We talk, of course, about the brain, animal vs. human trials, and forging a path in science for people that look like you. I hope you enjoy this interview!
Dani Janae:
Okay, cool. Yeah. Okay, so let's see. Okay, next question. Was the love for the sciences cultivated in you as a child, or was that something that you found later on?
Yesenia Garcia:
I would say I have always been very interested in biology in general, but I don't think it was very much cultivated in me by my educators, or by anyone else. I think it was just my own passion for loving animals and wanting to understand how people and life comes to be at a molecular level, which always made me very interested in my biology classes. I remember doing dissections in class and I thought that was the coolest thing ever, and I wanted to do every part, because I wanted to understand how everything was connected, and how it came to form a function. And so, I think just having regular class experiences is what made me seek out more of those experiences, but I never really had someone that told me that, "Oh, you should be a scientist. You're pretty good at this." I've never really had that in my life as a role model early on.
Dani Janae:
Okay, cool. Do you remember, were you involved in anything outside of class that was science geared? So like extracurricular activities, or afterschool stuff?
Yesenia Garcia:
Nope. I didn't do much of that. I remember having to come home and do a lot of babysitting, and taking care of family members, so I didn't really do a lot of extracurriculars growing up.
Dani Janae:
Okay. So you said you're studying right now for your PhD in Neuroscience. Was that your first choice or was it a journey to get there?
Yesenia Garcia:
Yeah, I think growing up, my parents always wanted me to be a doctor, because they are immigrants and so they were like, "The American dream is for you to be a doctor, have a very successful profession." And so I went through high school thinking that that was going to be the plan for me. But when I got to college, I then started doing pre-med courses and then getting more clinical experience, and I started getting trained as an emergency medical responder. And then I realized that I actually don't like interacting with humans on a clinical level.
And so I was like, well, I don't want to be unhappy for the rest of my life. So I had to have a conversation with my parents like, "I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I'm not going to be a medical doctor." So I just had to figure out what it was that I liked. And so, I really enjoyed the psychology and biology classes I was taking in college, and so I just kept going down that route. So I majored in neuroscience and my junior year of undergrad, I started doing research in a neuroscience lab and I really liked it, so I sought out more experiences, and now I'm here.
Dani Janae:
Okay, cool. So you said you just got back from lab, so what does an average day look like for you?
Yesenia Garcia:
Yeah, so my lab studies rodent behavior, and so every day I get to work with mice, which I really love doing, because I love working with animals. I'm really interested in studying social decision-making behaviors. So we basically have a lot of different behavioral experiments that we put mice through, to understand how they're using their brain and what strategies they're using to do these different tasks. So yeah, a lot of my day's putting mice into different boxes. Eventually we sacrifice the animal and then my job is to look at the brain and the tissue to try to understand which neural circuits are used in different behaviors, and what are the changes that are happening at a molecular level. I'm really interested in adolescent isolation. All the animals I work with have been isolated and grown up that way, but then reintegrated into social groups, and then I'm really curious into how that affects long-term social decision making.
So I want to see what the impact of this early life adversity is on their brains. Today I just got back, well, I got back last night from a conference, so I went to work late, but essentially one of my lab jobs is to make this chemical called paraformaldehyde, which is what we use to preserve the mice brains. And so, we all use that chemical, so it's up to me to make a big batch of it. So that's what I was doing just now, putting it into lots of test tubes for future use.
Dani Janae:
Cool. Okay. I have a question about that. So you said you sacrifice the animal and then you look at the brain to study what decision making pathways are involved in the decisions that they make. How can you tell looking at the brain after it's been sacrificed, what those pathways are and what do they look like once they are no longer alive?
Yesenia Garcia:
Yeah. So for example, the current experiment that I'm working on with a student is basically, when the mice are alive, we take them through a behavior task and get them to do the social interaction for an hour, and then immediately after that, the mice are then sacrificed, and then we’ll take their brains. And we are looking at this specific protein called CFOS. And so, CFOS is an immediate early gene, and what that means is that it's active after a particular activity, so we can time our experiments. So if we sacrifice them, we know that this protein is going to be active just before it was sacrificed.
So using tools like this, we can basically see which regions of the brain were active just before the mouse was alive. And so, yeah, after we take the brain, what we do is we preserve it and then slice it up into a little slices, and then mount them on slides so we can image them with a microscope. And then we can orient ourselves to which region we're interested in, and then we can go ahead and count the cells that are within each region that let us know the activity that was going on in those regions.
Dani Janae:
Okay. Got it. When you said the protein's name is CFOS is that C-F-A-S?
Yesenia Garcia:
C-F-O-S.
Dani Janae:
Okay. Got it. Thank you.
Yesenia Garcia:
Of course.
Dani Janae:
Okay, so next question, what is... Oh, sorry, I've worded this question really weird. What is a misconception about the brain that you would like to dispel?
Yesenia Garcia:
Yeah. Some of my earlier work when I started grad school was about sex differences, which are really interesting to me as a trans person. So essentially there's a lot of, I guess in science and in the world in general, these false dichotomies between male and females. And that translates a lot to the neuroscience research, where people believe that there are male brains and female brains, which is a very simplistic and incorrect way of looking at things, because basically all humans have, we all have the same hormones, and the chromosomes, and things, and not everyone aligns with the sex they were assigned to at birth.
And so, I think one myth that I think scientists and people in general believe is that sex is just one thing, but in reality, it's actually a collection of multiple traits that are related. So for example, people think if you're a male, you have XY chromosomes, and you have high levels of testosterone, and everything will follow in line. But biology and the world gives us a broader understanding of that. There's a lot of nuances essentially, that someone with XY chromosomes may not have the higher levels of testosterone that people associate them with, or things like that. So yeah, I think that is something I'd like to dispel, yeah.
Dani Janae:
Cool, thank you. Okay. What do people assume about you when they hear what you do?
Yesenia Garcia:
Yeah, people assume that I am a brain surgeon who works on people, and they also think that I am a therapist, and then they tell me all about their psychiatric problems. Every time I'm in an Uber and they ask me what I do, and I tell them, they start telling me about their grandparent who has Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. I always find that funny, because the work I do feel so unrelated to that, even though yes, I am a neuroscientist and I know a lot about the brain, but all of these different conditions are so specialized, and I have no idea about how I'm going to fix Alzheimer's, and so...
Dani Janae:
Yeah, totally. So right now you work with mice. Are there any other animals that you work with?
Yesenia Garcia:
Yeah, when I was an undergrad, I worked with birds. I worked with a species of birds called zebra finches, and I really enjoyed my research. We studied traumatic brain injury, and so we basically had to give these birds concussions. And the question we were studying was how do sex hormones influence the repair and regeneration of the brain after a traumatic brain injury? Because something that I find really cool is that the estrogen, the typically female sex hormone, is actually really helpful and beneficial in increasing healing in the brain after a traumatic brain injury. And so, we were interested in looking at different hormone levels and how that influences brain healing.
Dani Janae:
Yeah, that's really cool.
Yesenia Garcia:
And so in that lab, I studied estrogen and also testosterone, and I always like to joke that it's because of that research experience that I became trans, because I had to read about so much testosterone and estrogen, and I was like, "Wow, this is really cool."
Dani Janae:
Yeah. I am kind of just unfamiliar with the world of scientific research. So is there a goal to get to looking at human brains, or are you just going to stick with animals for now?
Yesenia Garcia:
Yeah, so there's a whole bunch of research. And so, my type of research was a basic science research right now, which is, basically I'm just really interested in understanding what the biology is of something. And so, biology between mice and humans is actually pretty similar in that cells work the way that they work across many different species. And so, there's other types of scientists who are more translational. So they are kind of like the bridge between animal research and human research, and they're really interested in making those, translating that research experience. And then the more clinical research scientists are people who work with just humans. And so, for me, I am really just interested in the basic biology and understanding how these cells work. So that's going to be my focus going forward, yeah.
Dani Janae:
Okay. Thank you. okay. So this, it's a question that I'd like to ask, but it seems like you're going to have a good answer for it based on the other answers that you've given. But does your queerness ever become relevant or intersect with what you do on a daily basis?
Yesenia Garcia:
Yeah, I think it does play a very large role in what I do, and it's also the motivation for what I do. I remember when I first got into graduate school, I was very scared of being in academia, and as a first generation Mexican non-binary scientist, I just was very apprehensive about what my experience would be, and feeling isolated in grad school, and not having social support. So I decided then that I would make it my mission to be as queer and non-binary as possible, and just to build a community around that, so other people like me could see themselves in STEM. I created a blog my first year called nonbinaryneuro.com, where I just started... It was basically an online diary where I just talked about who I am, what I was going through, applying to grad school, all these different things that I never had much exposure to.
And so, I started just tweeting a lot and also posting on my blog a lot, and I began to gain a big following because of that, which translated to me getting speaking opportunities. So I got invited to speak at a lot of different conferences and schools, and I was being paid to give all these talks to students. And yeah, my overall message was, my aim was to foster belonging in these communities and in these spaces where people who look like me don't typically succeed in. So that's the reason. At the end of the day when I'm really tired and I'm like, "Why am I in grad school getting paid pennies?" I'm like, "Oh, yeah, it's because I want to be a role model and to be the role model I didn't have growing up, and I just want to be an example of what it means to be successful in that field."
Dani Janae:
Yeah, totally. Okay. So I have one more question, and then I have a reader submitted question that I forgot to send to you, but sorry about that, but I don't want to surprise you, but there's another question after that. But my other question is, are there other queer scientists in your field that you get to interact with?
Yesenia Garcia:
Yes, definitely. My lab is very gay.
Dani Janae:
Oh, cool.
Yesenia Garcia:
It's the reason why I joined my lab, is because my advisor did a very good job of fostering a diverse and inclusive community. And so, most people in my lab are queer and/or trans, which is great. But then, since I was so active on Twitter when I first joined grad school, I now am connected to lots of queer scientists in our field, which has been very cool, because I get to see them at conferences and in real life, not just online. So yeah, I've definitely done a good job of building and creating this community of queer neuroscientists.
Dani Janae:
Totally.
Yesenia Garcia:
And it's been really awesome to help each other get different opportunities. I got to invite one of my friends who is a really incredible researcher to give a talk at Emory. And so, yeah, it's been great to foster these connections that help me emotionally, but also we're helping each other professionally succeed. So yeah.
Dani Janae:
Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, so last question, reader-submitted question. This is from reader Stef. They want to know about our brain's role in processing and understanding physical pain.
Yesenia Garcia:
Let's see. Is it okay if I don't answer that question?
Dani Janae:
Yeah, that's totally fine.
Yesenia Garcia:
Yeah, I just don't have a good answer for it right now. Yeah. I don’t want to give misinformation.