From the Lab to the Limelight - Blog version of our #TraineeTuesday Twitter series
This week’s #TraineeTuesday star is Olivia Meisner, an INP graduate student co-mentored by Steve Chang, PhD, and Anirvan Nandy, PhD! She investigates the neural computations underlying social behaviors and decision making in social interactions.
For her first project, she’s investigating the role of oxytocin in prosocial decisions. Her focus is on oxytocin infusion in the amygdala, and how it might alter neural activity in the anterior cingulate cortex (a region involved in social reward and motivation). Her other project investigates the neural mechanisms driving cooperative social behaviors.
Social behaviors have significantly contributed to the way our brains process the world around us. This knowledge is critical for understanding the neural mechanisms of typical social interactions as well as for learning what neural dysfunctions may underlie atypical social behaviors such as in the cases of psychiatric disorders like autism and social anxiety disorder.
Olivia Meisner
She recently won two awards: the Best Poster Award at the Society for Social Neuroscience (S4SN), and the Society for Neuroscience’s Trainee Professional Development Award. “I am honored to have received this poster award. After several years of limited, virtual conferences due to the pandemic, it has been reinvigorating to share my research and reconnect with the scientific community,” Olivia said. Through conversations with participants at S4SN, she gained insight into future analyses and has a better understanding of how her results fit into “the bigger picture of our understanding of the social brain,” she added.
Olivia’s first exposure to research was as a summer intern at the Tulane National Primate Research Center. She performed cell culture experiments with borrelia burgdorferi, the spirochete that causes Lyme disease. After researching the nervous system at a molecular level, she was curious how changes at a cellular level came together to produce complex behaviors. Then an undergraduate at Emory University, she joined the lab of Jocelyne Bachevalier, PhD, at Emory to study learning, memory, and socioemotional processing at a systems level.
After graduating, Olivia became a research technician at MIT. Working with Guoping Feng, PhD, and Robert Desimone, PhD, she used behavioral assays to characterize baseline behaviors in wild type marmosets and confirm ASD-like phenotypes in marmosets with a genetically engineered Shank3-deletion.
For her PhD, she wanted to continue researching the neural mechanisms of social behaviors. That’s what drew her to Yale. For the past four years, she’s pursued projects aimed at better understanding the neural computations underlying social decisions.
The overall highlight of her time at Yale has been the collaborative and supportive research community.
I was originally drawn to Yale because of the impression I received that the scientific community here was focused on partnership rather than competition. Upon joining the community, I was happy to find that this supportive environment was genuine and not simply a façade for recruitment purposes.
Olivia Meisner
Going forward, Olivia is excited to finish her project on oxytocin’s role in prosocial behaviors, analyze data for her second project, and present all of this at a conference. She also hopes to gain experience in science communication as she progresses in her research career.