That Neuroscience Guy - The Neuroscience of Being a Neuroscientist

Episode Date: December 16, 2021

We have had the privilege to talk Neuroscience on the podcast for the past year. But how did we get to the point where we can study Neuroscience, and educate others about it? In today's episode of That Neuroscience Guy, we discuss how to become a neuroscientist, including the education we needed to start and the work we do on a daily basis. 

Hi, my name is Olof Kergolsen, and I'm a neuroscientist at the University of Victoria. And in my spare time, I'm that neuroscience guy. Welcome to the podcast. Well, first of all, to all of our listeners, apologies again for being delayed. All I can say is it's Christmas, and it's been a little hectic at the University of Victoria. We are having a COVID outbreak, which has caused some interesting problems in my day-to-day life. Now, let's get on with the show. So, you all obviously like science and you like research, but do you really know how

it works? Like, how do you become a neuroscientist? You know, how do you do research? What's the process? On today's episode, it's the neuroscience of being a neuroscientist. So, basically it starts with training. So, you know, you go to university and you get a degree. A lot of universities don't have undergraduate neuroscience programs.

And what that means is that you end up doing biology because you're interested more in cellular level neuroscience so how neurons function at a very low level or you end up in psychology because you're interested in you know how vision works and how memory works and that's that's where i'm at like most of my research is done at the systems level so in terms of my, we study learning and decision making. Those are our two big pieces, although, as you all know, we also do stuff with mobile technology, which is an area I'm quite fascinated by. So you go get an undergraduate degree in biology or psychology, and possibly neuroscience.

There are universities in Canada and the United States that have undergraduate neuroscience degrees, but even within that degree program, you'd probably be specializing towards the cellular level stuff or the systems level stuff. Then you go to graduate school. Not everyone does a master's degree. I did personally, but you can get an MSc, a Master of Science in neuroscience. At my university and most universities, there is a neuroscience graduate program of some kind. And then you do a PhD. You get your doctoral

research and position. Now, graduate school is very different than undergraduate. Usually at graduate school, there's a lot less coursework. It's more about doing research. So my graduate students take a couple classes, but they spend most of more about doing research. So my graduate students take a couple classes, but they spend most of their time doing projects. They're literally doing research and running the studies that we publish in papers, and it's how we find out how things work. And when you're finished, you have a PhD. Now, in some cases, you skip the MSc, all right? And a lot lot of programs they basically go straight from undergrad to PhD.

In my case that's not what I did, I did the MSc but it is an option. And getting a PhD, like I said, really what it means is you've taken a couple classes but you've basically run three to four research studies on your own and you come up with an idea. When I did my PhD I was really interested in error processing in the brain when people were reaching and grasping objects. So I ran four studies that were looking at that issue and I had an idea. This is how I think error processing works in the brain and you become an expert in that area. So PhDs are generally very specialized and they're not a broad,

you know, it's very rare that you get a broad level of knowledge from them. Now in the old days you would finish your PhD and you would just become a professor and start doing science. But now what happens is typically you end up doing what's called a postdoctoral position. And it's sort of a holding place. It's where you go and you do a little bit of research, and you possibly learn a new skill, and that's what you do until you've acquired enough experience to become a neuroscientist or become a professor.

In my case, my postdoctoral position was at the University of British Columbia, and I specialized in medical neuroimaging. I learned how fMRI and MRI works and I spent two and a half years doing that. Then finally you get a job as a professor. You get hired as an assistant professor and you are supposed to start a research program. Now this varies quite a bit, depends on the university, but the common formula is what we call 40-40-20. And what that means is 40% of your time is spent doing research, running your lab. 40% of your time is spent teaching undergraduate classes. And I'm always surprised because a lot of undergraduates don't realize that I have a lab and do research, which is really what I was hired

for. They think I'm just a teacher, you know, a teacher at a research, which is really what I was hired for, they think I'm just a teacher, you know, a teacher at a university, but still just a teacher. But the reality is it's 40-40-20, like I said. So 40% research, 40% teaching. Now what's that last 20%? Well, part of our contract, part of the position of being a scientist is service. And what that means is I'm on university committees. So I, you know, one year I was reviewing the graduate program and making, suggesting changes. Another year I was doing scholarships and awards for incoming students. So services is of this broad category where you're expected to do things to help the academic community in general. You know, in my case, I'm on the National NSERC Committee. That's a government-funded

grant program for science and engineering. And that's my service piece these days. Well, before COVID, I used to go to Ottawa and sit in a room and decide who got grants that year. Now we do it by Zoom, of course. So that's the professor piece. Now another question that comes up is, well, ranks and tenure, and a lot of people ask about this stuff. So you start as an assistant professor, and generally you've got five years to prove that you can do the job. What that means is that you're doing research. You've started a lab and you're publishing papers and you're getting graduate students in. It means that you're teaching and you're not a bad teacher. And it means that you're doing that service piece. And after five years, you go up for what's called tenure and promotion. And a lot of you might be familiar with this idea

of tenure and it's a big deal. Well, it's a massive deal because at a lot of universities, at the end of those five years, if you don't get tenure and promotion, then you're basically fired, for lack of a better term. You're asked to leave and you go on and you either go to another university and try again or you literally switch careers. So after five years, you go up for tenure and promotion and then you become a tenured professor, which basically means you've got a job for life. It means you're at that university until you decide not to be at that university anymore. Now, you still have to, you can't just stop. There's kind of an unspoken joke that tenured professors stop doing things. Well, that's not actually true. You get reviewed every year, and you have to basically prove that you're meeting a certain quota of

research papers published and your teaching is at a level and you're still doing service. But then you get the promotion and you're officially an associate professor. Now, you can spend the rest of your career there, and a lot of people do, but the goal, the one I achieved and what a lot of us strive for is to be what's called a full professor or just a professor. Basically, at some point after you're an associate professor, you can submit your documents and say, like, I'd like to be considered for full professor. There's benefits to it. You get a pay increase, for instance, and you don't have to, you know, your job description changes a little bit. You actually end up doing more work because as a full professor, there's committees that you can be on that other professors can't be on.

That's how you become a research scientist at a university. Now, there's another path for this, of course. You know, you could get your PhD or maybe just your MSE and then do science for industry, effectively. A company will hire you and you will work for that company. That process is a little bit different. I've done a bit of that. I do some consulting work on the side, but if you want to be a neuroscientist and you go that route, effectively what you're doing is you're working for somebody and you're just doing science as a

job. So what I'll do is I'll stick with the academic side of science because most research science that's published is done in universities. So you were an assistant professor, then you're an associate professor, and then you're a full professor. Well, where do we actually do the neuroscience? How does that work? Well, effectively, when you're hired, you're hired because of your expertise. So in my case, in my first job, I was a professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax. They wanted someone that knew how to do EEG and neuroimaging, and they thought my research program in terms of learning decision making was cool. So I started my first lab.

We call it the neuroeconomics lab. Neuroeconomics is a field where basically it's all about learning and decision-making, but it's framed conceptually in terms of economic theory. For instance, the idea of value, something we talked about in our decision-making podcast, and how does that actually get realized in the human brain. But basically, you get given an empty room, and you typically have money. When you're hired as a professor, you're given an empty room and you typically have money. When you're hired as a professor you're given what's called startup funds. That's money to buy equipment for your lab.

And then also at the same time you write grants. So in Canada, the United States and in Europe, basically what you're doing is you're writing grants to the government saying, well hey, I have this cool idea, will you please give me money? And hopefully you get funded. Sometimes you're not. And so your goal once you get your empty room is basically to take your startup funds and write grants to get money to buy equipment. And that's what I did when I started my first lab, for instance. when I started my first lab, for instance. I bought a whole bunch of computers because we need computers for data, collecting data, and we need computers for data analysis. And I bought a couple of EEG systems and I bought a few other bits and pieces

that I thought I'd need. And then the next piece is you need graduate students. So you basically have to advertise. You have to sort of say, hey, the Craig Olson lab is looking for students. Could you please come and be a graduate student in my lab? And you have to figure out how to pay them. Most graduate students are fully funded.

They've either got scholarships from the government to fund them to go to graduate school, or the department pays for them. So some departments, when I was at the States for my master's degree at Indiana, the department gave me money every year to be a graduate student. Or the professor has a grant, and they're hiring you to do that research program. So that's how it all gets in place. You've got this career path, you've done your training, so it means you've got some ideas, you get your grants and you get your funding, and then all of a sudden you're doing neuroscience. So in terms of projects, you know,

what do we study? What do we do? Well, that comes down to, you know, what my training is. So for instance, in my case, I originally was really interested in learning in a specific type of learning called reinforcement learning, which we discussed in season one. And that was what my research program was focused around. I recruited graduate students that were interested in that space. And I had questions, you know, one of the things I was really interested in was, yes, we can measure these learning signals, but do they actually relate to changes in behavior? So yes, there's a spike in the EEG signal when you give someone positive feedback versus negative feedback, but does it actually translate to a change in behavior? And in one of my papers, a paper I published in 2009 with other colleagues, that was basically what we showed.

That was a big piece. Yes, we believe this is a neural learning system because here's the brainwaves and here's how they change, but here's behavior and how behavior changes. And then to be fair, your interests change over time. So I started getting more interested on the decision-making side of things. So I switched the focus of my lab. I brought in some graduate students who were more interested in the decision-making side. I brought in some graduate students who were more interested in the decision-making side. Now, I still have graduate students to study learning systems. It's always going to be a core piece of my lab, but we do a lot on the decision-making side.

And then, you know, other things happen. One of the best things that happened to the Craig Olson lab was Dr. Graham Moffitt, he's the former chief science officer of Muse. It's the mobile EEG system that we do a lot of work with. He reached out to me and said, hey, can you help us validate that this device is measuring brainwaves? And we did. And that opened a whole new line of research. So now half my lab is doing mobile EEG or mobile brainwaves. And that's why we call the lab the theoretical and applied neuroscience lab. The theoretical side is the learning piece and the decision-making piece. And the applied side is the mobile neuroscience

technology. And that's how neuroscience happens. You know, to summarize quickly, you go to university and you spend an awful lot of time studying. You know, my BSC took five years, my MSC took two, my PhD took five. So there's 12 years of university training. Then I did a postdoc for two and a half years. So 14 and a half years of school to say I was a neuroscientist. Now you can do that more quickly. There's definitely cases where people zoom through in less than 10, but in my case, that's what it took. You get a job as a professor.

You meet the contract requirements that I discussed. And then, guess what? You're a neuroscientist, and you can do cool things. Anyway, kind of a weird episode, but I hope you all find it interesting. This has been the neuroscience of being a neuroscientist. We'll be back next week with another episode. We're still trying to plan ideas, so remember, email us, thatneuroscienceguy at gmail.com. If you've got cool episode ideas and things you want to know about, please let us know,

because I'm happy to do the research and learn and share what I know. Of course, follow me on Twitter. It really does help, That Neurosci Guy. We have our YouTube channel that I talk about all the time. I admit it's really focused on some specific things, but hopefully you'll find it interesting. Anyway, my name is Olaf Krigolsen, and I'm that neuroscience guy. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next week.