I am Chiara Manzini, and I'm an assistant professor at George Washington University
and you're in my office.
We work on a variety of disorders that affect brain development, ranging from autism, intellectual
disability, and all the way to brain malformations which are very severe disruptions in the way
the brain forms in babies.
I was, I grew up in a small town in Italy.
My dad was the town doctor.
He really wanted me to be a physician, I really didn't want to be a physician because I was
always interested in biology since when I was a little kid.
When I was 12 I read a book about molecular biology, and I had always been interested
in science and, but I clearly remember reading about DNA and recombinant proteins and being
just like, oh my god this is the coolest thing, ever.
And I've pretty much had a single focus ever since.
So I'm interested in how the brain forms, and during the development of the baby if
something goes wrong I want to figure out how that can lead to disease that affects
either the cognitive abilities, so the capacity for learning, and social interactions.
At the beginning of the week I'll talk to the people in the lab, and we'll talk about
plans for the week, what they want to do so I can have meetings with people in the lab.
There will be, right now I'm writing grants because we're nearing the deadlines.
So most of what I do is like write grant proposals, write papers.
For me is really the excitement to be able to just go back to a family and say, this
is what's wrong with your kid.
Which I think is really important and at least you give them an answer on what is going on
in the disease.
Because you can't do science in a box you actually have to talk to a lot of people.
you have to constantly come up with ideas and what I find really fascinating is actually,
the more diverse the background, the more diverse the expertise that a person has, the
better it is to talk to them about, about research.
Because, they'll come up with ideas that you wouldn't've thought about.
And, and hopefully in the long term, what we really want do is to be able to understand
what these genes do, and to identify targets for therapies so that we could develop approaches
to treat or cure the diseases we work on.
I've had a lot of friends who were exceptional scientists that don't do well on standardized
tests, and so I think you should never forget your passion for science.
Especially if you're not a traditional learner.
And so, I think that is really, that is really important because you have to work really,
really hard, but also you have to figure out your way of like, getting through the hurdles
of schooling sometimes.
And so it's really important for, for kids to know that it doesn't matter if you have
a learning disability, or a reading disability, you can still be incredibly creative and,
and you can use you're, you know brain, to do amazing things, so, that's smart.