I’m Danielle Lyons, I work in Adam Bachstetter’s lab as a postdoctoral scholar at the Spinal
Cord and Brain Injury Research Center at the University of Kentucky. I grew up in Simpsonville
Kentucky, which is an hour from Lexington. So I am home-grown Kentucky-bred girl.
When it was a decision on where to go to college and graduate school, the University of Kentucky
was a no-brainer.
My mom was an accountant for a while then she left and became a realtor while kind of
being a stay-at-home mom, she’s awesome. Then my dad works at the
Toyota Plant in Georgetown, Kentucky.
I wanted to be everything, which is still kind of my problem. So anything that was trying
to change the world, and I know that’s very corny but its true.
You can’t always pinpoint it to one person that determines what inspires you. But I think
for me it was all of these little steps that I just attribute to the Lord like leading
me to science and he used many people to do that. There was a high school teacher that
saw my love for science in my junior year and just giving me this project and I kind
of ran with it. When I was in college I was working in two labs, I loved both, one was
science and one was psychology so I didn’t know what I wanted to do.
Why I choose to actually become a scientist instead of a neuroscientist was my mom.
She has a very distinctive disease called trigeminal pathic pain, trigeminal
neuralgia and there’s not very good treatment for it. And that was kind of when I was like
you know what I’m going to go in and try to do something for it. And when you go in
you think you’re like going to cure everything, but you realize you can’t do everything
but you can do a small part and that small part can help someone else do a small part
and someone else do a small part and it just builds on each other
and that’s the magic of science.
I really like Adam, I really like working with him. I love the Spinal Cord and Brain
Injury Center. That’s actually one of the thing I love most about science because no
day looks the same. So one day we’ll be doing isolating microglial cells from mice
and we will be looking at flow cytometry data like seeing the cells. Another day we will
be doing MRIs, which is kind of where we’re at right now, looking at different types of
MRI sequences and collaborating with another lab to do that, along with the MRI spectroscopy
core here and determine what can we measure after a traumatic brain injury.
And so every day is different.
There is a moment and you don’t get it all the time, but when you find something out
that know one else knows. And so for a split second you are the only person in the world
that knows that. And so that’s just a revelation, that’s just special, a special moment.
We were just working on this project and we couldn’t figure out this protocol and you’ll
kind of came in right when we like figured it out and its exciting. But you work, work,
work and you try really hard and then if it doesn’t work out exactly the way I want
it to work out, that’s hard. So you have to handle defeat and then you just have to
persevere knowing that one day, it will.
So the project we are working on right now is the whole lab is based upon looking at
neuro-inflammation after traumatic brain injury, so the one project that I am really kind of
interested in is actually what happens after a traumatic brain injury and how can we look
at that in MRIs, so using those different sequences so how can we measure cerebral blood
flow, how can we measure astrocytic growth and the varied acidities, how can you look
at edema and using MRIs and other confocal techniques you can look and determine what
is happening what time points are important. And in the future, hopefully maybe some drugs
can help those issues.
Well, I love the University of Kentucky just in general, it’s just home to me. I love
that I feel like I can go into multiple people’s labs and ask them for help on understanding
a protocol or understanding a new area and understanding how to work a machine and they’ll
help me. But I also like it because I feel like most of the people here, I can’t speak
for everybody, right, but most of the people here truly are doing it for the right reasons
and so that’s encouraging.