Changing Jobs, Moving Cities, Coming ‘Home’
Anyone in academia will tell you that relocating your lab is a big decision, a big deal, and a big undertaking. There are experiments to finish, reagents to use-up, knowledge to transfer, stuff to give away, things to box up, and farewells to be had. Now, layer on packing up your laboratory and life into a moving truck mid-pandemic and driving 1500 miles to the gulf coast during hurricane season and you will have some sense of the chaos of my most recent experience. Needless to say, these past few months have been … interesting.
Yet, even in the era of COVID19, people changing jobs is still commonplace and the reasons for moving between institutions can be as diverse as the research topics of the scientists making the moves. People move for all kids of reasons, … new resources, new opportunities, new sources of funding, and countless others. I had many professional reasons for accepting an offer to work as an Assistant Professor in the Clinical Neuroscience Research Center at Tulane University. But the one I will write about here is a personal one because as it turns out, I have a long history with Tulane University and the “Big Easy” runs in my blood. So saying yes to this opportunity was more than just about taking advantage of a good job opportunity and setting off on my own professionally; it was about coming home.
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As I navigated this major career transition, my thoughts turned often to my grandmother, Vege. She lived a long and full life until her death at 94 in the days following a stroke she suffered the night after she finished knitting a welcome blanket for her 8th great-grandchild. She was born Edvige Nelson in New Orleans in 1919, at a time when all the street lights were gas lamps, when the horse-drawn carriages plodding though the French Quarter weren’t just for show but in fact were the only way to get around, when Canal street smelled of imported coffee and bananas rather than beer and sweaty tourists, and when the only way to escape the heat of the day was while sipping a sweet tea on the porch while watching the street cars go by.
Vege was one of 9 surviving children born to her father William James Nelson and her mother, Louise Fortier. Louise descended from two prominent New Orleans families**. On her father’s side father was Amedee Fortier, a farmer and property-owner from a long line of Fortiers whose prescence in the region began with the founding of the city of New Orleans itself (the land deeds given to the family were signed by Emperor Napoleon in 1776). On her mother’s side were the influential Soniats, a French family whose legacy could be traced as far back as a medieval castle gifted to the Soniat Du Fossat family by the King of France at that time as a gift for the patriarch’s sacrifice during the Crusades.
Engler Family Photos from 1880s to 1940s (from top left to bottom right): Nelson family including my Grandma Vege as a child and her parents William Nelson and Louise Fortier circa 1930s, the Belcastle in France awarded to the Soniat family, Alcee Fortier circa 1880s, a sample course bulletin from the Tulane School of Dentistry where Dr. Eugene Fortier taught courses circa 1920s, the Fortier family circa 1890s, Rit and Lucien Fortier circa 1940s, New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal where Dr. Lucien Fortier published scientific work circa 1920s.
Notable among this family tree is Alcee Fortier. Alcee served as a professor of Romance Languages with expertise in French and its various regional dialects such as Creole, Arcadian, and Islenos; he was one of the first faculty members at the newly established Tulane University. There is even a building on Tulane’s uptown campus named for him.
Continuing the Tulane legacy, in the 1920’s, Grandma Vege’s ‘Uncle Mac’ (Dr. Eugene Fortier) worked as a Tulane faculty member in the School of Dentistry and taught several courses. In fact, he was noted for his pioneering work in developing surgical interventions for pyorrheal (periodontal) diseases. He would later go on to suffer a stroke that left his left side paralyzed but spared his faculties so that he could still tell stories of the family and his childhood at the Fortier Plantation.
His brother, ‘Uncle Rit’ (Dr. Lucien Fortier) was educated at Tulane University where he earned degrees in Pharmacy and Radiology. Following his training, he served as a surgeon in the medical corps in Limoges, France during World War I. He returned to New Orleans to become one of the first radiologists in the region, operating a successful radiology clinic and publishing in medical journals regularly.
And then there is Grandma Vege. She lived through the Great Depression with her parents and siblings in a little house off of the oak tree-lined Carrolton Ave. As a young woman, she worked as a technician at her uncle Rit’s radiology clinic to help support the family. She was in her early 20’s when her mother Louise opened up the family home to board armed service personnel. As a (purposeful) result, Vege met my grandfather, Frank Engler, a young army staff sergeant stationed in New Orleans. Setting aside Louise’s outdated match-making approach, Vege and Frank were madly in love, a lasting close connection that was evident even in my memories of them together decades later. They married within months and spent the next several stressful years apart while Grandpa Frank served oversees during World War II. And as soon as he arrived home, Vege, Frank, and their five sons (my dad was the middle child) settled in what was at the time a remote, undeveloped, and therefore cheap coastal community of Point Dume, Malibu in sunny southern California.
Engler Family Photos 1940s to Today (from top left to bottom right) - Grandma Vege and Grandpa Frank on their wedding day circa 1940s, Vege awaiting love letters from Frank while he was deployed oversees during the world war circa 1940s, Frank Vege and their five boys including my dad circa 1950s, the Malibu house where they lived for 50+ years circa 1960s, Grandma Vege with one of her grandkids circa 1970s, family gathering outside enjoying the idealic coastal climate circa 1980s, Grandma Vege and Grandpa Frank surrounded by all of their grandchildren at their 50th wedding anniversary circa 1990s, Grandma Vege and I enjoying the local pool circa 2000s.
And there they lived, next door neighbors for nearly 60 years to Vege’s younger sister, Mary, and her husband, Arnold Engler, my grandfather’s half-brother (two half-brothers married two sisters). This modest country house, with the sounds of the seagulls squawking overhead, the feel of the refreshing salty mist on the afternoon breeze, and the warmth of all the big family gatherings are where my memories of Vege begin. At these gatherings, I consistently remember a house full of people. My grandfather and uncles would watch football and mix sazaracs in the den and my aunts would chat over petite quiche in the dining room while Vege would be in the kitchen, looking out onto the two acre backyard where the grandkids, me among them, roamed free. These gatherings were a little bit chaotic, very crowded, and always loud but this is how she wanted it and how I remember her fondly.
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When I think of Vege now, I remember her smile, her hospitality, and her genuinely happy outlook, even as she faced challenges and transitions in her own life. Just as leaving most of her family behind in the bayou to start a new life in California with her husband, moving to New Orleans for my family and I wasn’t easy. But even the short time I have lived in New Orleans has helped me to feel close to Grandma Vege again; this move is allowing me to know another side of her, one I only got glimpses of while she was alive when I listened to her read Cajun stories with her beautiful drawl or savored her red beans and rice. So, despite the challenges, the stress, and the uncertainty that comes with any move, I had to say yes to this opportunity.
And even more so, moving to New Orleans provides an opportunity for my daughter to know her great grandmother. That’s because that new baby Vege was knitting a quilt for, born just days before she died, is my daughter. Though they never met in life, I have to hope that by bringing my child to the historic Big Easy, to ride the same street cars, to appreciate the same foods, to grow up in the same place as Vege did 100 years ago, we are in part bringing her back home to her own family history, back to a place where she might know her great-grandmother, and back to where she was meant to be all along.
The Engler-Chiurazzi family on their first day making their new ‘home’ the historic French Quarter of New Orleans, 100 years after Vege’s time.
**Given the Fortier and Soniat family’s occupancy of properties such as the Petite Versailles estate as well as the former Orange Grove plantation in Jefferson Parish (which now serves as the present day site of the Cytec Industries Fortier Plant), and their sordid history as slave owners, though this practice was accepted at the time, this history is one that I have had to, and continue, to reckon with as a descendent beneficiary of systemic exploitation and racism that harmed so many generations of African American people. Though I can’t change the past actions of my ancestors, I can and do seek opportunities to improve our collective future for people from all backgrounds; please visit the Service tab to read about some of these efforts and learn about how you can help.
Dinner, Drinks, and … Due Dates – the birth of a successfully funded collaboration to address postpartum mood disorders
It started out innocently enough. Late in January, I got a text from my friend and colleague, Dr. Shari Steinman, asking if we could get together for dinner that night. Without even consulting my spouse, I agreed because I always love getting together with Shari and her family. Shari and I met through a mutual friend, Dr. Jill Savla, an absolutely brilliant badass pediatric cardiologist who was Shari’s roommate in college and who I have known since middle school. When Shari earned a faculty position at WVU, Jill connected us and implored us to be friends. It wasn’t a hard sell as we are both trained in Psychology, we both study mood disorders, we are both academic mamas, and we are both obsessed with Moana. That our spouses and kids get along too is just a silver lining to a beautiful friendship and a meeting of great minds.
Almost as soon as we sat down, I heard those famous last words, “No pressure to say yes but I have a great idea for how we can collaborate!”. There was a funding mechanism, the WVU Research and Scholarship Advancement program, and the application was due in 10 days. I already was juggling an R01 grant submission and preparing to serve as an Early Career Reviewer at an upcoming NIH study section and Shari had a thriving lab, courses to teach, and patients to see. But Shari and I had been looking for just such an opportunity to work together scientifically and also somewhat selfishly, any excuse to hang out together more often. And so, right there at the table, balancing our forks and our wine glasses while burping babies and coaxing kids to eat their vegetables, we began hashing out objectives and designing studies on cocktail napkins with restaurant-supplied crayons.
We decided to address the ‘Baby Blues’, a topic near and dear to both our hearts as moms, by determining how the immune system might be to blame. We knew from past research that mood disruptions during pregnancy and the postpartum period (commonly referred to as ‘the baby blues’) are extremely common. Problematically, the consequences of serious or persistent versions of these complications, like feeling constantly anxious or depressed, socially withdrawing from support, and not being interested in infant care-giving to name a few, have important negative impacts for both mother and child.
We also knew that emerging evidence from a number of laboratories implicates an imbalance in the immune system with the development of mood disorders in the general (non-pregnant) population. Importantly, during pregnancy, the function of the mother’s immune system is profoundly altered and generally suppressed to enable the fetus to develop without the mother’s body interpreting it as a foreign germ and attacking it. Over the course of several months during the postpartum period, the mother’s immune system must return to normal function to be able to fight infections. We thought that a lag in the recovery of normal immune function, especially among certain immune cells that may promote resilience to stress, may create an immune imbalance, potentially prolonging, or perhaps even causing, the ‘baby blues’ or worse, debilitating postpartum anxiety, depression, and other mood disorders.
To test this hypothesis, we devised a project with two studies. For the first study, using groups of female mice, we sought to determine if the immune system of postpartum mice had a distinct profile from that of mice of the same age who had been previously pregnant or who had yet to experience a pregnancy. Since experience with stress is a significant predictor of the development of mood disorders and given that pregnancy and the postpartum period are associated with an increase in stress among mothers, we planned to determine if any immune system differences observed in these mice would be associated with how our animals responded to experimentally-induced, ethnologically-relevant stressors.
The study of women was to involve clinical assessment of new mothers’ experience with the baby blues, feelings of anxiety, or other mood disruptions and correlate these symptoms with levels of cytokines (proteins that signal to the immune system) and different immune cell populations in blood collected at several times during pregnancy and the postpartum period. The goal of these efforts will be to determine if the rate of immune recovery in the post-natal period is associated with the extent of mood disruptions and if pre-natal immune profiles could predict which mothers would be most at risk for pervasive postpartum blues.
It was quite a productive dinner and figuring out our aims was a major hurdle overcome! But we were still faced with the issue of time, or rather, a serious lack of it. The submission deadline was just over a week away and we are both very busy ladies! Juggling teaching loads, meeting schedules, experiments, and kids’ ballet classes, we hashed out a writing plan, and got to work. And after only a few days, a lot of hard work, and several absolutely necessary in-person coffee dates … I mean meetings, we had crafted our masterpiece and were ready to press the “Submit” button. A few months and a pandemic later, we got the great news that our interdisciplinary proposal was selected for funding by the WVU Research Office! We are both thrilled, excited to move this important project forward, and hopeful that our data will help ease the burden of postpartum mood disorders for moms and kids everywhere.
For more specific details about the scientific premise and the proposed experiments, please visit the Research tab.
Dr. Shari and Dr. Liz hard at “work” composing their masterpiece and celebrating its success! Feb 2020
Liz’s Lab Book Club - May 2020
On May 1st, I hosted a book club with my lab members. I chose a book titled “The Inflamed Mind” by Edward Bullmore for our first book club, as it offered evidence for the link between the immune system and major depressive disorder, a dive into history of theories of the cause of MDD and the subsequent treatments that became available, and helpful anecdotes to guide the understanding of the immune theory of depression. Altogether, the book laid out a strong argument for inflammation playing a major role in many cases of MDD.
My research team studies the role of B cells in providing a resilient response to stress in mice. With the axiom that MDD can be caused by a pro-inflammatory response, the question of how other elements of the immune system, such as B cells, affect MDD symptoms is a worthy endeavor to explore.
In our book club discussion, we discussed our own experiences of the emotional side effects of inflammation in a similar fashion to Edward Bullmore in his book; I brought up my experience with wisdom tooth extraction leading to my emotional experience afterwards. We agreed that storytelling and reference to personal experience can guide the understanding of the immune underpinnings of depression.
“As this inflammatory theory of depression continues to gain empirical support, I hope that it will offer hope and new treatment prospects to millions of people worldwide.”
Bullmore explained the old mistaken ideas people in the past had regarding depression and the function of the brain, with one of the earliest theories being that melancholia is caused by black bile from the spleen, which, interestingly, offers a modicum of truth; immune cells located in the spleen, B cells, are often implicated in depression. A team member, Sabrina, decided to dig further into this historical perspective. Additional theories that greatly influenced Western medicine offered in the book, namely the divide between the mind and body rooted in philosophy from Rene Descartes, or “Cartesian dualism”, made me curious as to what others in my team thought: Are the mind and body truly separate, and are the real world consequences of this perceived divide merited? My team reached a consensus that the consequences of Cartesian dualism has led to mental health stigma, and a tendency for mental health and physical health treatments to be dealt with in much different ways, and perhaps leading to mental health facilities having a real geographic split from other types of health facilities despite all having their roots in dysfunction of bodily systems.
Bullmore posited that there are numerous studies confirming the link between the immune system and depression, and therefore treatments for depression which target the immune system may soon become available. My team members appeared to agree that this was an optimistic prediction, and that it would likely take more time than 10 years or so for the development of anti-inflammatory drugs or other drugs that target the immune system specifically for patients with depression. Our discussion of treatments included the vagus nerve, which is thought to reduce inflammation and improve mood, and the so far limited studies and difficulty of obtaining control groups for devices which stimulate it. I agreed to conduct a literature search on the effects the stimulation of the vagus nerve has on B cells numbers and their function and the spleen.
Overall, I found the discussion insightful and exciting, with all team members offering their opinions and giving relevant examples from their lived experiences. I was moved by the conservation to deliver my opinions fueled by my experiences in mental health services of the negative consequences of viewing mental health differently than other health conditions. The book was an excellent discussion starter, leaving my team with many questions and a new outlook on the real world implications of the historical neglect to treat depression as a disorder not just of the mind but with a physical, biological mechanism that could be targeted. As this inflammatory theory of depression continues to gain empirical support, I hope that it will offer hope and new treatment prospects to millions of people worldwide.
New B3 Buzz Series: Brains & Bruises
Liz’s Lab is excited to announce a new blog post series, “Brains and Bruises”. By now, Dr. Liz is known for her work as a neuroscientist studying how B cells control the response to stress as well as her commitment to trainee development and neuroscience education in the community. But few people realize that Dr. Liz leads a bit of a double life, getting sweaty, wearing panties on her head, hitting her friends, and earning some bruises as a roller derby diva. In this series, Dr. Liz or should we say, Sara Tonin, will relay the stories of her roller derby and research journeys, sharing tips, tricks, and pearls of hard- and sometimes painfully-earned wisdom about how to be a badass in the lab and on the track. So stay tuned for posts from Sara Tonin encouraging you to “Get Low”, “Fall Small”, “Practice Jamnesia”, and more on as you navigate your path to scientific success and mental wellbeing. So lace up your skates, don your booty shorts, strap on your knee pads, secure your helmet, and stay track aware for the upcoming Brains & Bruises posts. Until then, stay curious.
B3 Book Club - May 1st @ 11:00 am
For our very first book club, Liz’s Lab team member Ms. Josie Gilbert has graciously volunteered to host and selected “The Inflamed Mind” by Dr. Edward Bullmore (MB, PhD, FRCP, FRCPsych, FMedSci)*.
We are so excited about reading this book not only because the topic compliments our research interests so closely but also for the author’s perspectives on the practice of medicine within the field of mental health. We can’t wait to see what Josie puts together. Our meeting will be held on Friday May 1st at 11am (EST). Hope to see you there.
*Liz’sLab does not endorse any particular book provider nor do we receive any financial, in kind, or other compensation for any book purchases