From the Lab to the Limelight - Blog version of our #TraineeTuesday social media series
This #TraineeTuesday, meet Leah Harmon, a graduate student in the Chandra Lab! She was recently awarded the K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award at the 2024 annual meeting of the American Association of Colleges and Universities in Washington DC.
The K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award is given to graduate students who show outstanding commitments as prospective leaders in higher education, dedicated to advancing academic innovation in the realms of equity, community involvement, and teaching and learning. For Leah, who spends extensive time outside research on teaching, mentoring, and doing scientific outreach, it was “very rewarding” to be recognized for these endeavors, bolstering her confidence in her ability to pursue a career in academia and collegiate education.
Leah came into graduate school not certain about going to industry or pursuing the traditional postdoc-to-professor path. Over the past couple of years at Yale, she has realized that teaching students about neuroscience is one of her greatest passions.
The students’ enthusiasm and curiosity about the brain often reminds me of why I fell in love with neuroscience and reinvigorates me in my research.
Leah Harmon
“From a research perspective, working at an institution at Yale, which has such amazing resources and such a diverse group of researchers with differing expertise, has made me appreciate being in a collaborative, academic environment,” Leah said.
Together, these experiences oriented Leah towards staying in academia following graduate school.
Leah hails from Ipswich, a small coastal town outside of Boston, Massachusetts. A town full of nature preserves, coupled with being near the biotech hub of Boston, ingrained science into Leah’s upbringing. Two lab internships in the summers added to her extroverted personality and fascination with people, and she then went on to study Neuroscience and Behavior at University of Notre Dame. For Leah, neuroscience is “a way to understand humanity.” She was eventually drawn to neurodegeneration and brain aging for its complexity and devastating consequences.
While her grandfather was battling Alzheimer’s Disease, Leah firsthand saw how neurodegenerative diseases strip people of their identities and “place huge burdens on caregivers and society as a whole”. At Notre Dame, she completed a senior thesis on neural dedifferentiation — where the specialized neural cells revert back to a less specialized state — and went on to work at Harvard Medical School for a summer studying the role of epigenetic noise in brain aging — random fluctuations in the epigenetic marks that occur in the brain over time and contribute to the aging process of the brain. After deciding to continue conducting similar research in graduate school, Leah was attracted to Yale’s collaborative neuroscience community, labs that do “stellar work” in neurodegeneration, and the warmth that the INP students exuded.
In the Chandra Lab, Leah studies molecular and cellular mechanisms of Parkinson's Disease at the synapse. This includes looking at endocytosis — a cellular process in which cells engulf external materials or substances — and recycling of the dopamine transporter in Parkinson’s Disease models, as well as characterizing a novel phosphorylation (a biochemical process in which a phosphate group is added to a molecule) site on a-synuclein (a protein that plays a role in regulating synaptic function). She hopes to work simultaneously on both her a-synuclein and DAT (dopamine transporter) projects and write a thesis about these two sides of the Parkinson’s coin — a-synuclein aggregation and dopaminergic neuron vulnerability.
When I tell people outside of the scientific community that I research Parkinson’s Disease, they almost always bring up someone they know who has Parkinson’s, and they say how glad they are that there are scientists out there trying to identify causes and cures. These interactions remind me that my work is worthwhile and can have a real impact on people’s lives.
Leah Harmon
Leah also looks forward to mentoring her undergraduate student as she prepares her own thesis next year. For the rest of her time at Yale, she plans to continue teaching and staying involved with initiatives like Yale’s Brain Education Day, in which she serves as the lead organizer this year. After graduation, she hopes to complete a post-doc through an IRACDA (Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award) program, where she will continue to pursue neuroscience research while teaching undergraduate students at surrounding institutions. The end goal is to become a faculty member at a research institution, where she would be able to continue neuroscience research in her own lab and teach in the classroom as well.
“Throughout my career as a mentor, I really want to encourage young people, especially those from underrepresented groups in STEM, to pursue a career in neuroscience research and higher education,” Leah said.