Vatsala Thirumalai, a recent addition to the NCBS faculty line-up, can barely remember a time when she wasn't fascinated by neuroscience. In the interview below she tells how she is particularly interested in how the growth of the nervous system is coupled to the overall growth of an animal. A humble person, Vatsala explains her own growth as a developmental biologist largely in terms of the wonderful mentors she has had throughout her career.
G: How did you get into science?
V: I really was interested in neuroscience from the very beginning, that's what brought me into science. The interest in neuroscience came from two or three different avenues. One was that I liked biology a lot but if you looked in high school biology textbooks, then in physiology there are lessons on how respiration works, how circulation works, how the kidney works, and all that, but when you go to the nervous system, there was nothing really given in the textbooks. They only covered that simple monosynaptic reflex arc - you hit your kneecap and your leg flies up. And then they describe the different regions of the brain, cerebrum, cerebellum, spinal cord and so on. But that was about it. They never told you what was really going on in these brain regions, in the type of detail you would find for, say, the circulatory system. You know: all the chambers of the heart and how the flow goes from one to the next, through the lung, the oxygenation. When I asked my teacher Ms. Getsie about it, she told me that that was because we didn't know much about how the brain works. That piqued my interest in neuroscience. And on top of that philosophically I was interested in the nature of thoughts, why do we have thoughts, and what are they made of, is there a soul etc etc., so I really wanted to follow neurobiology and be a scientist.
