Pets: none

Favorite color: burgundy

Favorite food: pizza

Favorite place: Stone Harbor

My 20 hr day usually begins at the crack of dawn. Since my daughters are still very young, they seem to “get up with the birds.” After consuming an “unsafe” amount of coffee, I get the girls ready for the day, which includes the unruly task of combing their snarls out, then adding barrettes. For the next hour or so, I juggle breakfast and getting lunches and snacks prepared. After getting the girls off to school, I frantically race around the house making beds, putting the breakfast dishes away, and then starting the “never-ending” laundry. While driving an hour to work, I listen to books-on-tape (I like the “Classics” or autobiographies) or often times, I listen to Talk Radio for an update on the day.

This semester, I teach one graduate level “Biological Bases” course and one undergrad Neuroscience course. These classes only meet twice/week which “supposedly” lends me the remainder of the week to do my research (chronic pain and antisense -mapping cDNA's). Unfortunately, my research time is quite frequently interrupted by meetings, mentoring or preparing for an upcoming test.

By late afternoon, I race home to beat my daughters' school bus, praying that the traffic is not too heavy. I immediately get rewarded by my girls' smiles when they see mom at the bus stop. They're so full of energy, that it gets me going for the next half of the day (however, sometimes with 2 more cups of coffee)! The day then continues with playing outside with them (while catching up on interesting journal article or two) until it's time to make dinner and get homework started. While homework gets going, so does the laundry and checking e-mail. Luckily, by then, my husband who is a good cook, as well as being great with the kids takes over. Finally, its “phone tag” time (for whomever I've left hanging on my machine), clean-up time, bath time, story time, then bedtime for the girls. At this point, sometimes my day just begins. (Whoever said that juggling kids and a career is easy, must have 8 arms, two brains and a case full of earplugs)! The day finally ends, into the morning hour, when one of my daughter's talking robots startles the life out of me by screaming the time. I can perform brain surgery on animals in my sleep, and perform jugular or intrathecal injections with ease; however I can't figure out how to get the darn batteries out of the talking robot!

How did you get to be a brain whiz?
I don't consider myself a brain whiz, just someone who loves studying and discovering new things about the brain. I love when we're doing a project and you get to a cross-road and have to brainstorm. Nothing beats getting an answer to a project that you've been working on day-after day for a year. And at the end of a project, you realize that you have more questions than answers. Many times, that one answer can lead to pages and pages of new questions. That's when I realize, I'm addicted to unraveling even a small part of the “mystery of the brain.”

When I first started in this field, I had no idea how many different ways that one can study the brain. I originally just planned on going into medicine, but that quickly took a slight detour when I began working in the Neuropsychology Lab of Dr. Richard Bodnar, and then followed that work in the Neurology Department with Dr. Gavril Pasternak. My research involved the exploration of synergistic interactions among various brainstem regions. Through detailed microinjection studies, I documented the presence of interactions among various brainstem regions responsible for marked potentiation of opioid analgesia. My studies included neuroanatomical surgeries and cannulae placements and correlation of various regions with activity. My current research now involves the study of the functional role of opiate receptors through the use of anti-sense strategies which are based upon the molecular biology of cloned receptors. The actions of these antisense approaches are determined in behavioral testing, followed by anatomical and morphological correlations.

Further Research Interests
My laboratory has several research interests involving the pain inhibitory system. Our central focus is the pharmacological characterization of the endogenous pain system, through the use of antisense techniques. However, we continue to investigate opioid tolerance and synergistic interactions of pain-relieving medications. In addition to these areas of interest are collaborative efforts on the behavioral characterization of neurological symptoms associated with paraneoplastic syndrome.

What do you think is the coolest thing about the brain?
That over 100 billion neurons all originated from just one single cell, and that no two brains are exactly alike! I am fascinated with the brain's ability to control pain and reward. I'm fascinated with a person's ability to go from excruciating pain to complete pleasure, and from aversion to addiction and back again to tolerance. It's not hard to have a passion for neuroscience, especially when you see your students get excited when they finally understand such concepts as neurotransmission. It's like a light-bulb turning on for them, and just for awhile, you relive the passion beginning in them.