The ability of animals to tailor their communication to different social situations is more sophisticated and human-like than we often imagine. For Dr. Katherine Anderson, who recently earned her Ph.D. in molecular, cellular and developmental biology from CCNY, exploring the neurobiology of zebra finch songbirds opened a window into understanding behavior that mirrors our own. Her journey through the doctoral program was not only about decoding zebra finch songbirds but also about advancing community, creativity, and innovation in the world of scientific research.
Dr. Katherine Anderson. Source: Courtesy of Dr. Anderson
“I just always really liked figuring out how different things work,” Anderson said in an interview with the RICC. “Cells and molecules are as small as I’m willing to get to figure out those things.”
Her intellectual curiosity and love for creative problem-solving led her to join the molecular neuroscience lab of Dr. Osceola Whitney, who she described as a hands-on and creative principal investigator who gave her the freedom to think outside the box.
“I also view myself as a creative researcher, so this is the lab where I felt like I would have the largest span of creative freedom and support,” Anderson explained.
That creativity became prominent to her thesis work, which focused on the brains of zebra finches, which is a species of songbirds native to Australia that is also kept as a pet in the U.S. These birds, Anderson explained, learn to sing much like humans learn to speak and adjust their songs depending on social context.
Anderson aimed in her doctoral thesis to understand which regions of the bird’s brain were involved in identifying social cues and modifying vocal behavior in real-time.
“The key things I was looking at were two different circuits in the brain, one for singing or vocalizing and another for social behaviors,” she explained. “I drew connections between these two groups of brain regions, both on a correlational and physical level.”
One of the most surprising findings of her work was that these connections between social and vocal circuits had never been closely examined before, resulting in her research being a fresh and unique contribution to the field.
Dr. Anderson and members of the Whitney Lab. Source: Courtesy of Dr. Anderson.
Her research also contributes to a broader understanding of developmental biology by comparing neural pathways across species. After drawing similarities between zebra finches, mice, prairie voles and other animals, Anderson found that behavioral brain patterns may be more universally conserved than we think.
“What my research shows is that a lot of animals that we think are very different from ourselves are actually pretty similar,” Anderson said. “Humans are animals, and we’re all working in the same way on some level.”
Throughout her time at CCNY, Anderson embraced the collaborative and networking aspects of academic science. She frequently presented projects and posters at conferences and co-led a major collaborative project with colleagues Joseph Gogola & Andrew Savoy from the University of Chicago. Together, they read nearly 300 papers and compiled a digital visualization of neural connections in the songbird brain, which is available online as Oscine Structural Connectome for Investigating Neural Network Organization for other researchers to use.
Now, Anderson is continuing her research as a postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Dr. Erich Jarvis (a Hunter College graduate) at Rockefeller University.
“I’m going to be staying in the same behavioral interests,” she said. “But at Rockefeller, I’ll be doing transcriptomic analyses, looking at mRNA transcripts, and seeing exactly which genes are expressed at what time.”
While her long-term goal is to become a professor and lead her own research lab, Anderson is currently focused on digging deeper into the molecular pathways of social behavior. In her new role, she’ll move from analyzing single genes to mapping the activity of thousands across different behavioral states.
A painting by the artist Thi Ngo inspired by Dr. Anderson’s thesis on songbirds. Source: Courtesy of Dr. Anderson.
For aspiring Ph.D. students in biology, Anderson offered practical and heartfelt advice: prioritizing the people.
“It’s really important to make sure that you’re in an environment that you actually like and with people who support each other,” she said. “I feel like every single person at CCNY helped me so much, and that’s what helped me come out on the other side, happy and still excited about science.”
Sofia is a graduate student at CUNY Brooklyn College, where she’s pursuing her M.S. in Media Studies. In addition to writing for The RICC, she’s a writer for the features section of Brooklyn College’s student-run newspaper, The Vanguard. She is also a dedicated writer for the Brooklyn News Service.