Since high school, Alex Bardon has been interested in biology. As an undergrad at Caltech, she was introduced to the world of computer science.

Systems neuroscience was the place where those interests met.

“While individual neurons can perform some cool computations, when they are grouped in a system, these whole new phenomena emerge that you can't get at the single neuron level. I found that fascinating,” she says.

Bardon is now a third-year graduate student in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, where she is co-advised by professors Emery Brown and Earl Miller at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and studies how the synchrony between different brain areas changes, causing these areas to become more or less connected, during anesthesia.

“How such complex life systems are made and the way that biology can build from cells to circuits to brains fascinates me,” Bardon says. “With my research, I feel that I am contributing to making people’s lives better while at the same time exploring a huge, open question on a fundamental science level: understanding how consciousness is facilitated or disrupted.”

She took some time to discuss her research and experiences at BCS and The Picower Institute.

Can you describe the research you work on?

There's a lot of different anesthetic drugs, and they block different ion channels, or affect different parts of the brain. What I'm looking at is how those drugs change interactions between different brain areas and how they influence larger scale processes in the cortex, like oscillations or traveling waves of activity and how those are coordinated between different areas. Understanding this might help us to better explain what processes are being disrupted your cortex when you become unconscious.

Another question is whether these different anesthetic drugs have any common influences that we can measure. This is really important for monitoring unconsciousness during anesthesia in medicine.

What drew you to this area?

I love basic research and it is important, but I also want to do research that's improving human health and helpful to people in the world. Seeing some of the things that are being developed in the lab, with the ideas that I'm thinking about, makes me feel like I'm contributing to making people's lives better through our research.

For example, one project that the lab is working on is this closed-loop control of anesthesia, where they use recorded signals from the brain during anesthesia to actually control how much anesthesia to give. They're testing this in animals but are hoping to bring it to patients during surgery.

My research is contributing to that area by looking at these signals that we see in recordings of the brain during anesthesia and saying, what are the characteristics of different types of anesthesia? What are common signals that we see during unconsciousness from anesthesia? And are we able to then in the future use those to better monitor anesthesia, for example? This is important because you want to give patients as little anesthesia as possible while keeping them unconscious. This will help lead to improvements in anesthetic care, which I think is really cool and inspiring.

How do you think the BCS program has contributed to your research journey?

Even though I'm doing systems research, I'm also interested in the more molecular neuroscience side -- the components that build neurons and thinking about how those elements are affecting brain function at a larger scale. I'm interested in the bridging between those areas.

This is one of the broader neuroscience departments in terms of scope, and I think I've been able to take advantage of that while I'm here.

For example, even though I'm not in the molecular program, I took the core molecular neuroscience classes. I think my research also gets at this because even though I'm looking at systems-level effects, like brain waves and coordination between different brain areas, I am looking at these under the influence of anesthetic drugs, which are affecting different molecular receptors within the neuron. I have to think across those scales to try and contextualize that research.

You’re a Department of Energy Fellow. How does that support for work?

The program is the Department of Energy Computational Science Graduate Fellowship. It's for people who use computing in their research. They give us access to their supercomputers to use for our research, and I’ll be doing an internship at a DOE lab this summer.

I think it's been a great opportunity to get exposed to new developments in high-performance computing, which I probably wouldn't have gotten otherwise, but is actually really useful for my research. A common theme in neuroscience is that data sets are getting bigger and bigger as scientists get better at recording more and more detail. That's great because we can look at more at once and get a fuller picture of the brain. But it's also hard to deal with all that data sometimes. The high-performance computing world has tools for working with such large data sets that are very useful in neuroscience.

What other activities are you involved in in Building 46?

I'm the social chair for the Gradvocates in BCS, and I've also been involved in organizing some women in neuroscience seminars and lunches. I feel like that's part of my life here, too. Grad school can be isolating if you never get out of your lab, and a lot of scientific insight can also come out of random conversations with different people in neuroscience. You can be surprised by how things can be relevant to your work.

Being involved with women in neuroscience groups has been a way to branch out and meet other grad students and postdocs who share my experiences, and to meet with some really inspiring female PIs in our department to learn more about the process of searching for a job. I want to have a future in research, and there’s a lot beyond the work in the lab that’s important in getting there.