50 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
PROFILE“She realized, I think, before many people did, that if you were
going to understand what the heck the hippocampus did and what it
really had to do with episodic memories, you need to understand the
cortical structures that feed into the hippocampus,” Churchland says.
Buffalo originally planned to obtain two doctorates—one in
philosophy and the other in neuroscience. After completing her first
dissertation in neuroscience, however, she decided she was eager
to continue doing research. So in 1998 she left her philosophy PhD
behind and headed east to start a postdoc with Robert Desimone,
a neuroscientist who was then at the National Institute of Mental
Health. Buffalo was drawn to Desimone’s lab because his group was
investigating brain function at the level of individual cells rather
than brain regions, which had been the focus of Zola and Squire’s
lab. “What I was interested in at the time was how the activity of
neurons would contribute to behavior,” Buffalo says.In Desimone’s lab, Buffalo examined neuronal activity in
primates by recording both individual neurons and local field
potential, electrical signals produced by groups of neurons. Using
this method, Buffalo helped unveil important features of the neural
circuitry of attention, which was the focus of Desimone’s team.
Among other things, her work revealed that attention to a stimulus
enhanced the synchronization of high-frequency signals in the
superficial layers of a brain region called the visual cortex, while
it reduced the synchronization of low-frequency signals in deeper
layers of the same brain area (PNAS, 108:11262–67, 2011). The result
suggests the different patterns of synchronization across brain layers
play an important role in how the signals are processed and sent
onward in the brain.
Eight years into her postdoc, as her projects were beginning
to wind down, Buffalo started to think about her options. “I
really wanted to stay in academia, but I wasn’t convinced that I
was going to be able to find a job,” Buffalo says. “It was, as it is
now, a really hard time—and there were very few good tenure
track jobs for primate neurophysiologists.” But just as Buffalo
was considering making the switch to science policy or science
writing, she got a call from Zola, her former PhD advisor. He
had just been appointed the director of the Yerkes National
Primate Research Center at Emory University and wanted to
recruit Buffalo for an open faculty position. “Sometimes you
just get really lucky,” Buffalo says. “It was a great environment,
so I was really excited to have the chance to set up my lab.”Before getting that serendipitous call, Buffalo had applied
at other universities. But there were personal reasons that went
into her decision to accept Zola’s offer. “I won’t name names, but
there were a couple of job interviews that I went on, where... [I
got] the feeling that as soon as I said I had a female partner, the
tone of the conversation really kind of changed,” she explains. “I
decided early on that I’m not going to hide anything because I
don’t want to move my family somewhere where it would be an
issue. But I do think that has limited our choices.”MEMORIES AND MOVES
As Buffalo was building her lab at Emory, her wife was also starting
a new job as director of a nonprofit organization in Atlanta, and the
couple had a four-month-old son. “Thinking back, it was a crazy time,”
Buffalo recalls. Luckily, even before she had finished setting up her lab,
Buffalo already had a graduate student on board. Michael Jutras had
done research on learning and memory in rodents as an undergrad-
uate at Brown University, and was passionate about continuing his
work on this topic. “He and I really built the lab together,” Buffalo says.
Once her lab was ready, Buffalo immediately knew what
experiments to pursue. She wanted to shift away from studying
attention back to memory. During grad school, Buffalo had focused
on examining the neural structures associated with memory.
Now, she was equipped with the techniques she’d learned from
Desimone’s lab to investigate brain waves and other physiological
signatures of memory formation and retrieval. It was using these
electrical recording tools that Buffalo and her team demonstrated
the existence of grid cells in the primate brain.
“She really is an exemplary mentor for graduate students
and postdocs,” says Killian, who led the work on primate grid
cells. “She created an environment where people were able to
really conduct great science.” Buffalo was also thoughtful—
each Christmas, she’d give every lab member a book “tailored
to everyone’s unique interests,” Killian recalls.
As the years passed, Buffalo was recruited to join other
universities, so she and her family began to consider where else
they might want to live. They liked Atlanta, but after careful
consideration, they decided Seattle might be an ideal choice:
Buffalo’s wife had family on the West Coast, and there was a
primate center at the University of Washington (UW). When
Buffalo reached out to the university to ask about open faculty
positions, she was in luck: the chair of the physiology and
biophysics department informed her that a search for a new
faculty member would start in a couple of months and encouraged
her to apply. She submitted an application and landed the job.
Buffalo moved her lab to UW in 2013 to continue her work
on memory. Now, she and colleagues are using virtual reality
to more closely investigate how place cells and grid cells are
behaving in the primate brain. A burning question for her is how
the brain’s representation of space aligns with its recollection of
the time spent there, Buffalo says. “Why is it that we have these
spatial representations right in the structure that we know is
important for memory?” gElizabeth realized, I think, before many people
did, that if you were going to understand what
the heck the hippocampus did and what it
really had to do with episodic memories, you
need to understand the cortical structures that
feed into the hippocampus.
—Patricia Churchland, UCSD