Podcast: Veronica Flores, PhD'19, Discusses Taste Experience and Recent Tenure Track Faculty Position
Photo Credit: Simon Goodacre
March 18, 2019
Simon Goodacre | Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
Veronica Flores, PhD'19, discusses her work across the disciplines of psychology and neuroscience in the Katz lab. Flores studies the effect of incidental experience on taste using a rodent model. Recently, she was selected for a faculty vacancy by Furman University in South Carolina. She will begin working in this role in August.
Transcript
Simon:
Hello, and welcome to the Highlights podcast. I'm Simon Goodacre, the assistant director of communications and marketing for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. And today I'll be speaking with Veronica Flores, a PhD candidate ... well, not a PhD candidate anymore, I suppose. Are you a freshly minted PhD yet?
Veronica:
I guess so. I defended a couple of weeks ago.
Simon:
… Defended a couple weeks ago in psychology, and soon to be a tenure track professor at Furman University in South Carolina. Congratulations!
Veronica:
Thank you.
Simon:
So, let's talk a little bit about your research at Brandeis. I wanted to ask you about what you've been doing in the Katz Lab while you've been there.
Veronica:
Sure. So, the Katz lab is a taste lab, so we're a systems neuroscience lab primarily. Even though we reside in the psychology department, we're interested in how taste is processed in the brain. Specifically, we use a rodent model.
And as a psychology student, I came into the lab interested in behavior primarily. How do we learn about tastes? What is it about novel experiences that might change the way we perceive tastes? And coming from a background of a lot of animal work, it suited me very well. So, I've been in the Katz lab for my PhD and my master's degree, and for the entire duration of those two degrees, I have focused on how incidental experience impacts learning.
Incidental experience is not something we often think about as something that's worth looking at. So you can think of it as things we might classify as trivial. So, maybe going to a restaurant a couple of times that you don't really love, you don't really hate, but you go to it because it's convenient. Or your egg salad lunch, you know, it's not often people claim that that's their favorite dish. But it turns out that, even in rodents, these fairly benign experiences matter and change the way an animal will learn about a very new taste. And this is really interesting, too. The chemosensory world that's interested in taste and odor, and taste and order processing, because we don't often study rodent models that incorporate any type of experience outside of what they learn in our experiments. So, we tend to use very naive rodents, but that kind of glosses over the true nature of our work, which is to relate it back to the human experience, and us humans coming from a diverse set of food experiences, it becomes difficult to link those two together.
So, what my work aims to do is to bridge the gap between rodent models and human models, giving rodents that little bit more of extra experience that might be a little bit more closely related to what we experience as humans and seeing how that changes learning. And it turns out that it does seem to impact the way they learn.
Simon:
And what would you, or how would you describe the process of experimentation with the rodents? Is that the right word, experimentation or ...?
Veronica:
I guess so. So, how I give them experience?
Simon:
Yeah.
Veronica:
I can do it a bunch of different ways. One of the ways I like to do it scientifically, or the way I do it, is to give them precise amounts of different flavored liquids. So, in my case, I give them experience with a salty taste. And so, it's incidental, meaning that nothing happens. They kind of just sit around in a box, they get very measured experiences with the salty tastes, very measured experiences with the sour tastes. And then a few days later I teach them how to develop an aversion, so a bellyache to a brand new taste. And, in all my cases it's sucrose. It's something sweet, something that I know that they're going to go for because rodents like sweet things just like we do.
Simon:
And how does this research bridge the gap between neuroscience and psychology? You mentioned that earlier on, but how are you working in both realms?
Veronica:
I think I work in both realms by really tying in behavior to neural processing. So, oftentimes you have folks who just study behavior, and that's their passion, and they might not always relate that back to what's happening into the brain. And on the other side, you have folks who study brain processing, maybe specific genes, molecules or systems in the brain that we know to be very important, but they might not relate it back to the functioning of that animal's natural daily processing.
So, what I hope to do and what I hope I am doing is kind of bringing those two back together, making sure that there's an understanding of yes, I'm interested in how an animal behaves and how it changes its learning. I'm interested in the actual behavioral output of that relationship of sensory input going into a behavioral output. But I'm also interested in the neural processing that links those two together. And it's something that now is not super prevalent in maybe high-impact science, but it's something that I think is important to think about or to be reminded about when we're talking about science, and especially in the chemosensory world.
Simon:
That was actually my next question about. What's the importance of the research that you're doing? I mean, is there a practical application for it in terms of human behavior or…?
Veronica:
There's a of different ways you can think about it. One is, my primary importance or significance is that I want to make rodent models that we can better apply to human understanding of how humans learn about foods. That's my primary goal. How do we make a learning model that's more representative of how a human learns about food? And then, when we go down that second bullet point, how humans learn about food, well that's a massive amount of areas that are really important to us as a society today. So, it could impact undereating disorders or overeating disorders. How do different cultures learn about food? How do their experience impact it? What makes it so that certain people like certain foods, maybe picky eaters versus non-picky eaters? So I think reason why I like my research so much is because it gives insight, a little bit of insight, into many different avenues that we can easily relate to on a very kind of not superficial basis. It's kind of in your face.
Simon:
I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about your experience performing research at Brandeis. How would you describe the lab environment?
Veronica:
I would say my experience in lab has been one of the most interesting experiences working with the group of people that I've had in my life. So, everybody in my lab, they are kind of my closest friends. They're my colleagues. They're also a kind of family type of environment. In our lab we work in a very small space. Our building is relatively one of the older buildings on campus, and so, therefore, we have more close quarters. And I think, you know, that might seem frustrating to a lot of people that you want a little bit more elbow room. But when you think about it in terms of how science works, it's favorable, because we are constantly asking each other. We don't have to go very far to say, "What do you think about this? What do you think about that?" And what ends up happening is that you end up working in a very almost loud environment where you share ideas, or sometimes you get into good, solid scientific arguments about it, or you can easily have your questions answered by your peers. And I think in a lot of ways that's brought us closer together because there's just this environment of, you know, we're kind of open access—here we are. We're always available for one another and that has made science more of a beautiful thing than what I was expecting when I entered graduate school.
Simon:
Oh, that's great. Let me ask you about the faculty at Brandeis. How would you describe them?
Veronica:
My experience with the faculty have been in mostly in the psychology department and a little bit in the biology department since I did do my master's in the neuroscience program.
Brandeis is a special place because it's super collaborative. Most of the faculty that I know are doing experiments or trying to bridge experiments with other faculty across many lines. So, I know faculty who've done biology and who've partnered with the philosophy department, or there's many collaborations between, naturally, between psychology, biology, and neuroscience. So, I find them a supportive group. They are willing to listen to your ideas, even as a novice. Sometimes they might say, "Well, you know, let's reconsider that. What are some reasons why that might not work? What are some reasons why it might?" Or, "That's a good question. Have you thought about it this way?" And so, I've always found that, at least for my experience, the faculty have their ears and doors open to helping me and my colleagues grow as researchers and as scientists, making sure that, you know, they're not always telling us yes, but they're helping us grow by pushing us to challenge our own thoughts.
Simon:
What's your favorite thing about the psychology department?
Veronica:
In terms of my education, the psychology department gave me the opportunity to broaden my teaching skills in addition to focusing on my research. Coming into graduate school, teaching was always something that I kind of had in the back of my mind as an option for a future career, and the benefit of the psychology program is that it had that ingrained into the program. It was part of my training, it wasn't something I needed to seek outside of it.
Simon:
How did you come across Furman University's faculty opening?
Veronica:
It's an interesting story. So, I entered the job market beginning this past summer, more with the intention to test the waters. I wasn't completely sure if I was fully equipped in terms of my experience. I don't have a PhD yet. Let's just see how this works. And so, what I did is, I started probing different people, alumni in my department, which is another great thing that they offered. We often have panelists come who are alumni to give us, you know, tips about, about what it's like to enter the job market, in very different realms, not just academia. And I had attended one of those and all four or five alumni gave me mounds of advice and they just gave me a ton of resources, and I found Furman on one of those resources that the alumni gave me.
Simon:
And my final question for you then is, what advice would you give to someone who's considering pursuing a PhD in psychology?
Veronica:
I would say to consider Brandeis as a place where you can broaden your horizons that go beyond earning your PhD. What I think I have learned in this process is to not forget about your personal growth, not just you as a scientist, but you as a person. Where do you see yourself going? Where do you see yourself wanting to be? Even if you don't know, where do you think you would want to be? And use that almost as a compass to figure out where you want your science to go, what kind of career you'd like to have.
I think the psychology department here at Brandeis gives you the tools to explore those options and kind of do a little bit of mental reflection into you as a person in addition to your science. You're not just a graduate student pumping out data. You're a baby scientist here to learn how to create data, how to get good research, but also, how to become a professional who's good at what they're doing, who's productive, who's happy, who is going to contribute to society in a meaningful way. And I think that's an awesome thing about the program that folks should consider.
Simon:
All right. Well, thank you very much for your time.
Veronica:
Thank you so much.
Simon:
And, listeners, I hope you'll join us next time on the Highlights podcast.