We are back with our 'spotlight on' interview series, shedding light on inspiring women working in the field of neuroscience and reflecting on their distinct backgrounds and career journeys. The questions posed to these individuals explore the themes of job perks and challenges, developing new skills, inspirations in the neuroscience field, and goals for the future. Stay tuned to see new interviews every few weeks from women in a range of neuroscience-related professions!
This month, we interviewed Dr Jessica Agnew-Blais, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Queen Mary University of London. Jessica discusses the journey of her career thus far, including moving to a new place, navigating finding a job, balancing motherhood, and the tips she has for students and early career researchers.
Can you tell us about your background in science, your current area of study, and what interested you about neuroscience initially?
I’ve been interested in issues around mental health for as long as I can remember. Why people think, feel, and act the way they do is something I find innately interesting. However, I wasn’t always very clear about my career path, and in the US we don’t specialise at university until comparatively later, so I took several kinds of classes in subjects like History, Archaeology and English Literature, which I loved. I ended up majoring in Human Biology, which was an interdisciplinary major that combined biological, behavioural, social, and cultural perspectives to study human health and disease. Through my coursework I learned about public health school and realised this was a great fit for me, as I was interested in mental health at a population level.
I ended up getting my PhD in Epidemiology, which was a bit unexpected as I really did not enjoy my statistics course during university. Once I learned that I could use statistics to answer questions I was really interested in, such as why certain people were more likely to suffer with certain diseases, or why some people’s health worsened whilst others improved, I started to really love it. My focus for my PhD was Psychiatric Epidemiology, and I was super lucky to work with some amazing scientists who taught me a lot and were also really lovely people, which is so important.
After I finished my PhD I moved to London with my partner, which was good timing in some ways, but not great timing in others because I was visibly pregnant at that point. So, I went to a few job interviews but I could tell people were looking at me and thinking, “um, what are you doing here?”. But it worked out well in the end, as by the time I had my daughter and was ready to go back to work, a postdoc position opened up with the E-Risk study. E-Risk is based at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN) at King’s College London, and involves a twin study of over 2000 monozygotic and dizygotic twins. Twin studies are really cool because they leverage the “natural experiment” of twinship to help disentangle genetic and environmental effects (because identical twins share 100% of their DNA and fraternal twins share 50%, but importantly both sets of twins share the same, or a very similar, environment).
As part of the E-Risk study, we looked at the course of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) from childhood to young adulthood, and found some really interesting results, especially about individuals that were meeting diagnostic criteria for ADHD in young adulthood. Surprisingly, we found that a large proportion of people, who met all the symptoms and impairment criteria for ADHD at age 18, hadn’t done so when parents and teachers reported on their ADHD symptoms in childhood. This was really surprising because, by definition in the DSM (the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders), ADHD often emerges prior to age 12.
One interesting thing, about those who tended not to meet ADHD criteria until young adulthood, was that they were more likely to be women. Trying to understand this finding steered me towards my current research, which is focused on looking at ADHD, over the life course, among girls and women. I am currently funded by a New Investigator Research Grant from the UK Medical Research Council to examine these questions, including childhood and adolescent factors that may lead to late diagnosis, how ADHD symptoms change across puberty, as well as whether ADHD symptoms fluctuate across the menstrual cycle amongst women with ADHD. More information about my current research can be found at our team’s website.
What are the most enjoyable aspects of your current job?
I have an amazing team of early career researchers in my lab and working with them is a real highlight of my job. I also have fantastic co-workers at QMUL who are so thoughtful, supportive and fun; they improve my research as well as my mood on an everyday basis.
What are some of the challenging aspects of your current job?
As a lecturer we have a lot of different responsibilities—teaching, supervising projects, students , providing pastoral care, marking, reviewing academic papers, managing research budgets, and writing grants. I find it challenging to switch back and forth between all these different tasks. It’s easy to spend all your time on short-term tasks and not focus on the deeper thinking that goes into writing and research.
What are you currently trying to get better at in your neuroscience job?
Ooof, time management is eternally something I am trying to get better at. I am not naturally a super organised person, so I try to borrow various strategies from my more organised friends and colleagues, like tracking my time to see how long various tasks take. But I’m far from having discovered the secret to being good at this!
Which women in your life inspire you, in neuroscience and beyond?
I was really lucky to have had amazing female mentors during my PhD and postdoc, like Professor Karestan Koenen at the Harvard School of Public Health and Professor Louise Arseneault at the IoPPN at King’s College London. I am also very inspired by my female colleagues at work, several of whom also have young children, and we are always sharing the joys and the challenges of being working mothers. I also had a working mother, and I have very distinct memories of watching her go off to work when I was a kid, and I think having this in the back of my mind helped me make this choice for myself.
What goals do you have for your career, and where do you see yourself in the next few years professionally?
One study I am working on now looks at how ADHD symptoms and impairment may change for women across the menstrual cycle. The effects of hormones on the brain and on women’s mental health are often overlooked, and this is perhaps especially true for women with neurodevelopmental conditions like ADHD and autism. Over the next few years, I would like to continue to focus on these questions, including a research focus on perimenopause and menopause among neurodiverse women. Perimenopause and menopause is a very under-researched phase of life for women; many women with ADHD, who I have worked and spoken to, pointed to this time period as one they were really concerned about and wanted to have more research on.
What advice would you give to women at the early stages of their neuroscience careers and to women wanting to pursue a research career investigating ADHD?
I think there is so much interesting work to be done in many areas, and of course, especially ADHD. As far as advice, I would say that there are ups and downs in research, and periods of time where things are going well and you’re publishing, getting grants etc, and then lulls where it feels like things are going really slowly and nothing is working out. Sometimes you just have to ride the wave for a bit (either way), know that things will change and try not to have your self-concept be too influenced by these phases. And of course, academia is not the only way to do research, and not the only way to do neuroscience, so I would also encourage people to think outside the box as well as other ways they can engage with neuroscience, via working for funders, industry, charities, the government etc.
What aspects of the science/academic industry do you think need improving/addressing, particularly in terms of issues minority groups may face?
I think it’s important for students/early career researchers to have mentors they can see themselves in - people who may have had similar experiences or faced similar challenges. Given the overall under-representation of women and people of colour in higher levels of academia, this is something that needs to be improved.
This article was written by Caterina Falvella and edited by Lauren Wallis, with graphics produced by Lilly Green. If you enjoyed this article, be the first to be notified about new posts by signing up to become a WiNUK member (top right of this page)! Interested in writing for WiNUK yourself? Contact us through the blog page and the editors will be in touch.
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