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Profiles of women in science: Kia Nobre, Head of Department of Experimental Psychology, Chair in Translational Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Oxford, Oxford UK

2019; Wiley; Volume: 50; Issue: 7 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/ejn.14440

1460-9568

Dana L. Helmreich,

Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology

We at EJN are pleased to introduce Kia Nobre for our next women in science profiles. We began this series to bring visibility and recognition to women scientists in our community (Helmreich, Bolam, & Foxe, 2017); you can find all of the profiles here https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/toc/10.1111/(ISSN)1460-9568.women-in-science. Dr. Nobre's latest publication in EJN is (Heideman, van Ede, & Nobre, 2018). Anna Christina Nobre (known as Kia Nobre) is a cognitive neuroscientist interested in understanding the principles of the neural systems that support cognitive functions in the human brain. Her current research looks at how neural activity linked to perception and cognition is modulated according to memories, task goals and expectations. In addition to revealing the basic mechanisms of these large-scale dynamic regulatory mechanisms, she is interested in how these develop over the lifespan and how they are disrupted in psychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. Kia grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and then completed her university education in the United States. She obtained her PhD (1993) and carried out postdoctoral research at Yale University, supervised by Gregory McCarthy, and then became instructor at Harvard Medical School, working with Marsel Mesulam at the Behavioural Neurology Unit of Beth Israel Hospital. She moved to Oxford in 1994 to take up a McDonnell-Pew Lectureship in Cognitive Neuroscience and a Junior Research Fellowship at New College. Prior to her current position, Kia was a university lecturer (Reader 2002–2006, Professor 2006–2014) at the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford, and was Tutorial Fellow at New College, Oxford (1996–2014). Kia is the first to hold the chair in Translational Cognitive Neuroscience at Oxford, held jointly between the Departments of Psychiatry and of Experimental Psychology. She is a Professorial Fellow at St Catherine's College. She is also Adjunct Professor at Northwestern University in Chicago, USA, where she is a member of the Cognitive Neurology and Alzheimer's Disease Centre (CNADC). Kia directs the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity (OHBA) and is head of the Department of Experimental Psychology (https://www.psy.ox.ac.uk). https://www.ohba.ox.ac.uk/team/kia-nobre-1 http://www.brainandcognition.org/ I had the pleasure of chatting with Dr. Nobre in March, 2019. KN: Since I was a kid, I think I always knew I wanted to be a scientist, I was very curious about everything. I never outgrew that three-year old phase of like, oh, why is the sky blue? Why is water slimy? Why are snowflakes all different? But I didn't know that neuroscience existed, and actually, neuroscience was still in a formative stage when I was in school–it wasn't the core science it is today. I had a specific, very strong, basis for the questions that framed a lot of my thinking as a kid; my younger brother, through a medical error, became very severely brain-damaged. He was blind, deaf and paralysed. I was very attached to him and I wondered: What is his life like? What is it like to live and not see? What shape do his thoughts take? What's in his mind and his imagination? Also, more generally, I was always playing at mixing up chemicals and trying to make things explode, making a mess in the house. I was lucky that I attended an international school. From there, the school strongly recommended that I go to a university in the states. My parents weren't very happy about that because they didn't really want me to leave Brazil. After lots of to-ing and fro-ing about should I stay in Brazil, should I go, what should I do? (I had my very early midlife crisis then), I ended up going to a small liberal arts college (Williams) in the states. It was like stepping into a different universe when I got there. I learned all kinds of concepts, like preppiness, and other things I didn't understand or know about. I realized that I didn't quite know how I fit in racially, because as a Brazilian most of us are mutts, a bit mixed. So at that time, this was in early 80s, things looked much more black and white. I was a bit confused as to where I should be, and it took quite a while to adjust. Because it was such a big soul-searching thing, the process made me grow up a bit, which was good, but the other thing is it really made me very close to my studies. I did loads of coursework and other things that I just loved to do. I went to college thinking I'd do some sort of combination of chemistry and philosophy, or psychology and biology. And then I took a course called physiological psychology, and I was just blown away. I realized that everything in my life that was in the back of my mind all those years actually existed as a subject matter that I could study –the relationship between brain and mind. It just came together then– I have been doing neuroscience ever since. After I finished Williams, I went back to Brazil for a year, to re-establish my connection to my roots, to the country, and to spend some time with my family. I went to Yale the next year. When I was at Williams, there weren't that many options –there were two labs that did neuroscience. I worked in an eye-blink conditioning lab with rabbits, and I was totally invested in that project, I loved doing that. I was in the lab all the time but I developed a severe allergy to the rabbits. I was never really interested in eye-blink conditioning itself, but was interested in it as a model for learning and memory at the systems and cellular level. I then chose to go to Yale; Yale offered me the freedom to explore and try out different labs. When I got there, I worked in a lab which did intracranial recordings in people with intractable epilepsy, and also noninvasive EEG and ERP recordings. I loved that lab, the work I did there, and I was really proud of my first publication from there, but I felt like I couldn't get at mechanisms very well. So I then went and worked for almost three years doing single-cell recording in hippocampal slices. That was much more mechanistic, but it really didn't give you the big picture. So I went to and fro a bit, and imagined that I would finish my PhD doing the cellular slice work. But one day, I thought: “Oh, my God, this is never going to get me close to the big questions that I want to answer!” And so I went back to the first lab, went back to human intracranial neurophysiology and EEG. All my student colleagues thought I was totally crazy –you can't do this, you're in your fifth year. And I said,” well, I cannot not do this; I don't care, this is for the rest of my life”. So I changed back and worked like a dog for that last year. In the end, I was really happy because I'd experimented with research at the systems level, doing single-unit recording, doing slices and doing human work. It was a real privilege having options and flexibility at Yale. I imagine some people could look back and think that it was a really inefficient path, but for me, having explored all these different levels of analysis was really informative. It changed the way that I do my human work now. Because I have the background of understanding the science that happens at these other levels, I can see how you can, and sometimes cannot, relate the human science to those other levels. I've had a few really great mentors, and I really learned from all the people I worked with. My undergraduate mentor, Paul Solomon, was great. He supported me and enabled me to be very independent. My mentors in graduate school–I worked with Tom Brown at the cellular level and then Greg McCarthy at the human neurophysiology level –were brilliant, interesting and totally different. I stayed on as a post-doc with Greg after I finished. This was the time when MRI was just starting; we were on the first cognitive MRI paper without contrast agents. We spent quite a lot of time building up those first studies. Greg, he's a really great methodologist, super knowledgeable, very clear thinker. So you learn to do things to the very highest standards you possibly can; I still feel I carry that in me. Then I went to work with Marsel Mesulam at Harvard, at Beth Israel Hospital. Marsel is my soul-mate mentor. We click in the way we think, and I've learned so much from him. He's very scholarly, broad minded and really brings all different aspects of science, history and things together. I've been really close to all the people I've worked with, and I've had an accumulation of great mentors. They all shaped me in different ways. I have quite a multifaceted job at the moment. I'm at the University of Oxford and have a statutory chair, which is held between Experimental Psychology and Psychiatry. Well, first, I started off as a lecturer, then became a reader, and then I became a professor. So I went through the usual rungs here, in the Department of Experimental Psychology. Then, I got this chair, which was amazing, and I thought, “Great, I've reached nirvana. I'm going hang out in my lab, do mainly research, I can lower the amount of teaching I do…” So I took the position, I think it was 2014 or 15, and then our head of the Department of Experimental Psychology passed away – all of a sudden, very tragically, totally unexpectedly. We were all devastated. Because I had this chair, I was asked to step in as head an emergency measure. I went around like a headless chicken in denial for a couple of weeks thinking. “Oh my god, who's going to take over the department, what's going to happen?” One day my husband, who's always telling me don't do this, you're doing way too many things, just stop, says – “you know you're it, right?” I became head of the Department of Experimental Psychology three years ago now. I also direct the Oxford Centre for Human Brain Activity, which is affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry, and I chair the Oxford Neuroscience Committee. We have neuroscience spread across all different parts of the university, and I try to make sure everyone stays in touch, get people together for big strategic calls, and such things. So I have a lot of really big governance and leadership responsibilities (that's the euphemistic side, you can call it bureaucracy and administrative commitments on the other side). Luckily, I have my lifeboat – my lab, I have a really great lab. Now I spend most of my mornings in the Department of Experimental Psychology as the head of the department. And since I'm not able to do anything half way, I'm full-on in whatever I do, we're refreshing our teaching and doing all kinds of new initiatives with great energy. But then in the afternoon, I go to my lab, and I'm able to cut off from all the admin stuff and just hang out with the lab, which is really what I love to do. But I don't want to give the wrong impression. There are many things about being head of department which I really enjoy. I think, especially as you get a bit older, you feel so privileged; all these lucky things that have happened to me – I've had scholarships; I've had great mentors; I've worked in great places with inspiring colleagues; I've been able to attract fantastic students. You realize this stuff doesn't just happen; it all works because people care, curate, take care of it, make it work. As head of department, I can give something back. And I also like to understand how science is changing, how the pressures are changing for the younger generations. How do we prepare the new generations to keep science alive in the world? I feel quite lucky being entrusted with these big responsibilities. I think that's a really interesting question, and I've been thinking about this rather acutely because of a problem we had on campus. Two years ago our department building was hastily closed. It was announced to the department on Friday that it was going be closed on Monday (a problem with asbestos). So, I had to manage this total mayhem; our building is the biggest research building at the University of Oxford. It held two departments and both departments became homeless from one moment to the next. This has consumed my life for the last two years, and that's the bit that is really tough and unpleasant, but it has to be done. So we moved everyone away, we found some local temporary spaces, we built some temporary new spaces. We've moved everyone back in, and now we're planning the new building. Because of that, I've been thinking – if you're going to build a department now, you have to build it for the future. What IS the future of neuroscience and psychology going to be like? I've been thinking about this in terms of real spaces; how do we design floor plans for the future? I think we're in a really interesting moment right now; in my view, academia and science in general, and to some extent psychology and neuroscience in particular, haven't quite kept pace with the technological advances that are taking place in the world. There is amazing technology being developed at the big tech companies, who are collecting loads of data and building gadgets to measure all aspects of our behaviour and our social context. And somehow, we haven't quite embraced that, or we haven't found the right way of having a mutually productive, cooperative relationship with these big companies. I think that is something that needs to happen. For example, I do human cognitive neuroscience, and in most studies we study attention or memory. We're really good at coming up with really creative tasks, but they are quite impoverished. Usually people are just sitting looking at a screen, and we're just recording button presses or maybe eye gaze. Meanwhile, we should be testing people in immersive environments, and measuring their behaviour at a much more sophisticated level. We spend a lot of time developing really, really clever ways of measuring signals from the brain, but we could be doing the same with measuring the equally complex signals that arise from human behaviour, and we're not really doing that. So I think we need a kick up our bum to step up to what the technology would enable us to do. We're still a little bit trapped in the old ways of doing science. I hope that there is about to be some kind of change, or embracing of the technology. Personally, I would like to move a lot of what I do to much more immersive contexts. And I also think both sides are missing out a bit. Often in academia, people get a little bit defensive and sometimes even paranoid; they feel somehow Google, Facebook, and all these big tech giants are somehow stealing things away or doing things that they shouldn't be doing. Meanwhile, these guys have amazing ways of measuring human behaviour. And they're doing it almost from scratch, as if they started from ground zero. They're not benefiting from all the really great knowledge that we have accrued and created, the theoretical foundations. Maybe they have their token psychologist or such, but there hasn't really been real full-on cooperation. I have no problem talking about that. Sometimes I feel a bit embarrassed because I really believe that the things that have held me back have been primarily in me. I've only had encouragement, support and opportunities from others along the way. I also happen to be very open and upfront; I probably confronted or just approached things, and I might not have read signals where people were trying to hold me back. But, I do not think it is not an issue; I think there is an issue. I became more aware of the fact that I was a woman in science after I got my permanent job at Oxford. All of a sudden, I realized that I was being looked at as this role model for younger women. When I'm sitting on so many committees, I realize that sometimes I am really the only woman in the room. A lot of the medical sciences are still quite male dominated, so obviously there is a problem. I also know that some women have had it really hard. I know from younger women who come and talk to me about issues they've faced– that these issues are real, unpleasant and not just minor things. I'm very willing and engaged in supporting women and all types of diversity in science; I think that is quite important. I believe that people need to understand who they are and what they want out of life and science. In my mind, I think people suffer a lot because they think that there is some kind of perfect model of success, and then they measure themselves against this perfect model of success. So they'll say, oh, I'm not publishing like so and so, and I'm not doing as much public engagement as this other person, and I don't have such good teaching scores. And what they don't realize is that nobody is doing all that – they're actually picking all these different people and amalgamating them into this impossible model that doesn't exist. In my case, the shadow in my life is that I was unable to have kids. A long and sad story. Anyway, that means I have more time available than most people. I love my work, my husband loves his work, so we work a lot. But I don't think that's necessarily what people should do. Some people like to be balanced, some people like to be workaholics, some people like to have a good life, some people like to be more scholarly, and some people want to be more productive. I think you just need to know what it is that gives meaning in your life. Then you should work towards that and just try to be true to yourself. And it sounds very Mickey Mouse and basic, but I think that's what it's all about in the end. I think you've got to aim to make yourself the best self that you want to be, not some model of something that doesn't exist. Absolutely. As head of department, you do see many more facets of people; people come to you in their moments of weakness and when they have problems. And you realize we all suffer at some point, we have problems, and we all take bumps and hits. And that's the other thing: you need to take a deep breath, you're in it for the long run, and it's a long game. You don't have to succeed all the time, at every moment. You need to think of it as a way of living, a career, and then try to think about what success would mean to you in that way. I think that these profiles are really nice initiatives. It's really nice to humanize people a little bit. Yes, exactly. In terms of my own balances and imbalances, for a long time I thought I should be one of these super balanced people. Who does a lot of exercise, and then goes to the theater, and then reads all these novels, and then…but the truth is that whenever I can, I like reading a paper, or working on some experimental task design. I'm a total nerd, and I just love that. So I have learned, through some sage advice of those who love me best, to just embrace my asymmetries. You don't have to be balanced, you just have to be yourself. That usually empowers people quite a lot; for young people who realize it is okay for them to go for what they really want to do. Well, I have so many favourites of everything, but one of my best recent travel experiences was piggybacking on a conference in January in the Caribbean. I learned to scuba dive very late in life, and recently I tried to go diving, but I had a total freak-out, I couldn't breathe underwater, and I couldn't go in. I thought, I'm never going to do this again, but I did give it one more try. And I had the most amazing sort of people on the boat; they said, just close your eyes when you're going down and make peace with being underwater again. For me, me that was just perfect. Being underwater is like being in another universe. I like the feeling of being untethered, completely free, and letting go of the expected. It was a double gift in the sense that I was able to go back into the water and appreciate this other world, and that reminded me to just let go and do things differently, in my science and in everything. I carry my Brazilian soul through music. Whenever things get a bit too rat race-y or irritating, I just listen to some good Bossa nova music and “The Girl from Ipanema” will put me right on track again.