Dr Beth A Habecker, Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine, Portland, OR, USA
I was hired to fill a pharmacology faculty position in a Department of Physiology & Pharmacology, and no one would have predicted then that I would be a Reviewing Editor for The Journal of Physiology years later.
My doctoral work in pharmacology with Professor Neil Nathanson involved cloning muscarinic receptor genes and studying the regulation of their expression and signalling in cardiac myocytes. I wanted to move from cultured cells into intact systems, so I chose to do postdoctoral training in neuroscience with Professor Story Landis, working on the sympathetic nervous system. This work combined cell culture studies with in vivo experiments in rats and transgenic mice. My projects all focused on interactions between neurons and their targets, studying how the cells communicated back and forth.
My lab is currently studying the sympathetic nerves that control the heart. We are trying to understand how neuron-heart interactions during injury and disease contribute to bad outcomes and are asking if we can fix nerves to prevent cardiac problems.
That may seem like an obvious outgrowth of my doctoral work on heart cells and postdoctoral work on neurons, and you might think that I had a master plan that took me from grad school through to the present. The real story is a bit more convoluted than that. Here is how it really played out…
My postdoctoral work focused on the development of sympathetic neurons that switched their chemical transmitter from norepinephrine to acetylcholine during development. This was triggered by things released by their target sweat glands. (This is now a classic model for neural development included in textbooks, but explaining to my non-science friends that I was leaving Seattle for Cleveland in order to work on sweat glands was difficult.)
I continued working on development in my own laboratory, obtaining some smaller grants and publishing some papers, but I hit a wall with NIH funding. It was clear that I needed to figure out a different way to “sell” the studies I wanted to do on neurochemical changes, or find another line of work.
When I took a step back, it dawned on me that the things I viewed as developmental factors were also injury-induced inflammatory cytokines. Many proteins that are important during development are turned on again after injury and play a role in tissue repair. I thought these factors might be doing something to the nervous system after injury.
I decided to switch to an injury model, and the heart was an obvious choice since sympathetic dysfunction and inflammation are both present in cardiovascular disease. A physiology colleague in my department connected me with Professor Donna Van Winkle at the Portland VA Medical Center who became a collaborator and helped my laboratory set up cardiac injury models. I knew I was on the right track when every grant application on the new project was funded the first time in.
A couple years after my research shift to neural control of the heart, my husband was accepted into a program that required him spend a month in Oxford for three summers. I could join him in the college at minimal cost, and I looked for a lab where I might learn some things that would be helpful.
I reached out to Professor David Paterson and introduced myself, explaining a hypothesis I was hoping to test and the type of experiment that I wanted to learn in his lab. He graciously allowed me to join the lab for a month, and a very patient postdoc helped set up my experiments and teach me things in addition to trying to get her own work done.
Amazingly, we generated usable data during that time and eventually published a paper together. Looking back, that was not only a great learning experience, it was also a much needed mini-sabbatical and change of pace. Everyone should have the chance to commute to work by walking through a park!
Now, many years later, I’m one of the old-timers in my department and everyone thinks of me as a physiologist because that is my research focus. One of the best things about being a faculty member is the opportunity to continually learn new things and grow, while also contributing to the larger scientific enterprise.
That is also one of the benefits of serving on an editorial board, and I am honoured to serve as a Reviewing Editor for The Journal of Physiology. It wasn’t a straight path, but I couldn’t be happier with the destination.