Stories of Women in Neuroscience · Stories of WiN

Dr. Sasha Fulton

·59 min·3 clips

Fluoxetine lost its behavioral rescue effect when hippocampal neurogenesis was ablated in irradiated monkeys.

Melissa Franch introduces Stories of Women in Neuroscience and welcomes Dr. Sasha Fulton, a postdoc in the Abdus Sabor Lab at Columbia University. The conversation centers on her work developing new gene therapy tools to study the cellular mechanisms of peripheral nerve repair and regeneration in the naked mole rat. Franch starts where this show likes to start, with the scientist’s own path into the field. Fulton says she majored in neuroscience in college when the subject still felt new at many schools. That made it exciting to enter, because it felt like a field with plenty still to learn. After graduation, she worked in a lab that did monkey work. She describes that project as a very large study run by a very small group of people. The episode then moves into the research that came later. Fulton talks about glial cells, especially astrocytes, and why they matter so much in the brain. She explains that astrocytes sense and survey their environment, maintain homeostasis, and help keep the microenvironment stable. They also support neurons by handling metabolism, neurotransmitter conditions, and ionic balance. But they do more than housekeeping. When they sense stress, they can become reactive and change their phenotype. That shift can alter the normal support they provide and push them into other roles. Fulton says that diversity is still being worked out across diseases and conditions. Her own work focused on an astrocyte-specific chromatin regulator. She says it is upregulated in human depression and in mouse models built around chronic stress. Much of her work was aimed at figuring out what that regulator does inside astrocytes and how those changes affect neuronal activity. The discussion keeps returning to the idea that glia are not one-note cells. Fulton sees them as cells that encode the conditions they have experienced. Near the end, she reflects on her own working style and admits that she can move quickly and sometimes act before thinking. Her takeaway is that speed is not always the best guide in the lab, and that careful work matters.

As heard by us

A neuroscience profile that follows glia, stress, and depression through one researcher's path.

Dr. Sasha Fulton's path through neuroscience is told plainly and with enough detail to give it shape: a college neuroscience major in 2007, early monkey work, then a turn toward astrocytes, stress, and depression.

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Why you'd press play

Follow one neuroscientist from an early neuroscience major to glia, depression, and peripheral nerve repair.

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