Rodriguez says she was kicked out of one lab before finding a mentor who told her, 'of course I would.'
1. Stories of Women in Neuroscience centers on Dr. Erika Rodriguez and her work on sensory cues, emotions, and social decisions in rodents.
2. Melissa Franch hosts the conversation, and Rodriguez is a postdoc in the Salzman Lab at Columbia University studying neural circuits.
3. The episode asks how Rodriguez moved from early biology interests to circuit neuroscience and why mentorship shaped that path.
4. Rodriguez says biology interested her since elementary school, then AP psychology in high school showed her neurobiology and how behavior has mechanisms.
5. She explains that she chose schools with neuroscience majors, even though she remembers neuroscience as a new field that was often merged with biology and psychology.
6. In college, Rodriguez joined Dr. Carolyn Pitta’s lab, where she studied neurogenesis, or the birth of new neurons, in songbirds.
7. She says she was pre-med at first, then realized she did not want medicine and instead wanted to do science through a PhD.
8. At Duke, Rodriguez rotated in Dr. Rich Mooney’s lab and learned sharps recordings in vitro, which she describes as poking a neuron to record and alter activity.
9. She later shifted from birds to mice in a neurogenesis-focused lab, where she continued slice recordings and expanded her genetic and behavioral questions.
10. Rodriguez says one lab environment was poor for mentoring, and that difficulty led to low confidence and eventually being kicked out of that lab.
11. A different PI immediately offered support when Rodriguez asked for a place to continue, and she describes that moment as the start of a better PhD environment.
12. Her PhD with Dr. Fan Huan at Duke focused on how sensory cues affect emotions and how facial pain differs from pain across the rest of the body.
13. She used viral tracing in mice, including peripheral injections and rabies virus, to map a direct facial pathway that bypassed a canonical route.
14. Rodriguez says bodily pain did not show the same direct pathway from dorsal root ganglion to the perivrachial region, which sharpened the comparison.
15. Behavioral tests showed that activating the facial pathway made mice avoid light-paired places and increased pain sensitivity, which she links to facial pain perception.
16. Rodriguez connects that work to her own experience of chronic back pain and says her personal pain episodes helped motivate the project.
17. For her postdoc, she chose Dr. Daniel Salston’s lab because it combined a traditional non-human primate focus with a mouse side, which she found useful for new questions.
18. She now studies social hierarchy in mice with tube tests, urine Q-tip assays, and social place preference paradigms, including sex differences in odor preference and rank stability over time.
19. The interview is conversational and technical, with Franch asking follow-up questions that keep the explanations grounded in specific experiments and lab decisions.
20. People interested in rodent neuroscience, mentorship, and women in STEM would likely value it, while listeners wanting a light general-audience chat may skip it.
