HEALTH SCIENCES
Meet a Neurobiologist at Harvard Medical School: Dr Celine Santiago By Annie Chen, Biochemistry, 2021
I
n my second year as a research assistant in Dr. David Ginty’s lab, I began to work closely with Celine Santiago as my research mentor. Before we worked together and got to know each other better, Celine and I had always been in close vicinity—we shared a working space with others in a four-person cubicle (I think it was called a ‘section’ and we were the best section) and we were in lab meetings together, just several seats apart. And of course, as a naive undergraduate working late hours at the lab, Celine was always there to help me fix the mistakes that I thought would lead to the end of my lab experience. A few weeks after Celine became my mentor, I began to understand how she is so successful with her mentees. In this interview, I asked Celine about her motivations as a research mentor and the secrets to her successful mentorship. Perhaps, for the readers, you can learn what to look for in a great research mentor and be inspired to start your own research experience.
What is your research interest at the Ginty lab? Celine: I am interested in how the neural circuits that process the sense of touch develop, and in understanding the role of tactile experience in that process. From the earliest moments of life, we’re bombarded by tactile stimuli, and there’s compelling evidence that early tactile experiences play an important role in brain development, as sensory deprivation can have devastating and lifelong consequences on cognition and behavior. So I’m interested in how neural activity in the sensory neurons that detect gentle touch affects their development, and as a consequence, the development of other parts of the nervous system.
30
Celine Santiago, Ph.D. Postdoctoral Fellow in Dr. David D. Ginty’s Laboratory Department of Neurobiology.
What sparked your interest in becoming a scientist? Celine: I became interested in science in high school, thanks to two amazing teachers who taught the A.P. Chemistry and A.P. Biology classes at my school. Through those two classes, I became fascinated by the mechanisms that underlie the ability of organisms to move, breathe, eat, and grow. The mysteries of developmental biology caught my attention right away—when I realized that all of the cells in an animal come from a single cell that contains all of the genetic information to make all of those various tissues and organs, it blew my mind. I wanted to understand how that could be possible. It wasn’t until college, however, that I realized that scientific research was a viable career option for me.
