Catching Brain Waves: Prestigious NIH award helps Prof. Divya Sitaraman and her student research assistants ride the rising neuroscience tide of brain-mapping

When Divya Sitaraman started her educational journey in New Delhi and Bombay, she trusted her gut to lead her where she needed to be. As it turns out, it was studying the brain.

“The day I stepped into the lab, I just loved it,” said the Cal State East Bay professor of psychology, whose research focuses on how genes drive behavior, particularly around sleep, arousal and decision-making. “I’m really a gut-feeling person. ‘Let's see where this goes’ has always been my kind of thing.”

Now, after teaching at CSUEB for five years, her gut — plus her scientific gumption, success in bringing her research into the classroom and capable student research teams — have led to an invitation to join a select consortium of universities and research institutes with $33 million in National Institute of Health funding to map the mouse brain.

This effort is part of a group of projects under the BRAIN CONNECTS initiative that is developing research capacity and technical capabilities to generate wiring diagrams of entire brains across multiple scales. 

Sitaraman and her student research team will work closely with the Allen Institute in Seattle — leaders in large-scale brain mapping — that will perform the high-level microscopy necessary to map mouse neuronal connections. The complex data sets will help the consortium analyze and understand the connections within a mammalian brain.

For the next five years, Sitaraman’s team will work with the project team to set up a research plan, help build the applications to access the data and mine the data sets to unearth new and valuable insights that could help with understanding the human brain’s inner workings.

This work could lead to discovering ways for healing the brain and maximizing its function, and hopefully pave the way to the Holy Grail of neuro research: the neuronal map of the human brain.

It all started with the common fruit fly and Sitaraman’s experience as a new mother.

Having a child and experiencing prolonged sleep deprivation made her consider the importance of sleep and how it affects our choices. The behavioral neuroscientist turned to the fly to understand the brain’s response to sleep deprivation and decision-making. 

“You and I look very different from a fly,” said Sitaraman. Yet, “70 percent of human genes whose abnormalities cause diseases have an ortholog in flies, and these include genes that cause sleep disorders.”

In other words, think of the fruit fly as that distant cousin you’ve never met but with whom you’ve been told many times you share an uncanny resemblance. As it turns out, fruit flies tend to make some of the same kinds of decisions as humans. 

“We find that a lot of questions and issues that we think about in the field of sleep in humans can be studied in flies,” said Sitaraman. “We see that when flies like to engage in some social behaviors they will suppress sleep, an experience all of us have had on a Friday night. Your friend calls up, and you're like, ‘Yeah, I'm gonna go hang out with my friend and sacrifice sleep.’”

When Sitaraman arrived in 2019, it didn’t take her long to realize her best resources for exploring her subject matter of fly sleep behavior and genes were the students around her. The brief life cycle of flies and semester/summer cycles happened to sync quite well.

“We're an undergraduate institution with students who have limited timelines to work,” said Sitaraman. “Flies have a really fast generation cycle. In 15 days, you get a new generation of flies.”

This rapid generation cycle makes it easy for students to get through the lab’s learning curve and have time to scour generations of data for relationships between genes and behavior, and then draw substantive conclusions before the semester ends. Plus there’s an additional benefit.

“Everything I do in the lab is with students. And then I bring a lot of this into my courses, which we call course-based research,” said Sitaraman. “Student learning has been much better. My own evaluations have gotten better because I'm engaging students more, and we even come up with new hypotheses in class that my lab tests.”

With success integrating the lab work into her courses, she applied for funding from NSF and NIH.

The result was back-to-back grants to support her efforts to center her students in her scientific research and bring the science of genes and circuits into the classroom — the first time that Cal State East Bay was awarded both the NSF CAREER grant and the NSF RCN UBE (Connectomes for Undergraduate Neuroscience Education and Learning) grant.

The CAREER grant was a start to thinking about ways to integrate her research with educational initiatives in the classroom and the CUNEL grant with collaborators Dr. Andrew Bellemer (Appalachian State University) and Dr. Kenneth Colodner (Mount Holyoke College) provided the opportunity to develop a whole semester's worth of curriculum in neuroscience.

Word of her success reached the Allen Institute, which recognizes the need to fill the science pipeline with future scientists from diverse backgrounds. The best way to do this is to give students early exposure to real-world lab experiences often, which is what Sitaraman had been doing all along.

“The Allen Brain Institute scientists Dr. Nuno da Costa and Dr. Forrest Collman who have been working on the IARPA-funded Vortex and Microns project  heard of our work and said, ‘You're doing amazing work with the fly resources. Can we now do this with bigger brains like the mouse brain?’” said Sitaraman. “‘You understand the students, you understand how to translate research in the labs to the educational environment.’”

As with the fly research five years ago, Sitaraman has invited students into this unique moment of scientific creation where the only rules are the rules the lab creates and the relentless pursuit of discovery.

Students arrive at her lab expecting structure and guidelines. Sitaraman has to reset expectations immediately with them.

“That’s the thing about research,” said Sitaraman. We are always looking, we know something, but a lot still needs to be explored. You try things, improve on them and that often leads to the next question.”

True to form, she sees this as another opportunity for her students to experience being researchers, hoping that the exposure could lead to more scientists entering her field of research from all walks of life.

“We do need science practitioners to be more diverse,” said Sitaraman. “We also need the ideas to be coming from everywhere.”

One of the best parts about the NIH consortium is the access students have to scientists doing the same work on the brain.

“The researchers at the Allen Institute who are developing and interpreting these data sets are active members of our classroom, and by directly partnering with scientists who develop these complex data sets, we are bridging the gap between science and education in the classroom,” said Sitaraman. 

Students will review mouse brain mapping data as it becomes available from the Allen Institute and attempt to make sense of what they see, hoping to discover new principles of nervous system function that have never been possible before. 

More importantly, the students will come to view themselves as the scientists they may not have imagined themselves to be.

“A lot of my students will tell me, ‘Oh, I don't think like a scientist. I am not a scientist,’” said Sitaraman. “I'm like, ‘What is a scientist? A person with some curiosity who is willing to look and find some answers. Science is everywhere. Science is everybody. Science is about process.”

With a lack of role models in the scientific community, it’s not surprising to Sitaraman that her students may not initially see themselves as becoming full-fledged scientists one day. But there’s no doubt in her mind that her students have what it takes to become scientists, and that’s what motivates her to get up every morning.

“Students come in with self-doubt, but they also come in with fresh ideas and they're willing to work hard. And I just love that about our students,” said Sitaraman. “So my biggest goal is that I continue to do the research I do with students. It's a highlight of my days when I come into the lab, and students make some kind of finding. And they're like, ‘Oh, Dr. S., I found this!’ And that's really the highlight. I wanna continue training students on this campus, ensuring that they go on, and stay in science.”