My name is Adam Oaks, we're in Chiara Manzini's laboratory at George Washington university.
This lab studies neuro-developmental disorders so we're looking at diseases of intellectual
disability and autism spectrum disorder.
I grew up in Maryland in Anne Arundel county, my father is a microbiologist and my mother
was an obstetrician/gynecologist.
I think I've definitely picked up on their enthusiasm for those fields in terms of my
own trajectory.
After I finished my undergrad studies I had a background at that point in cell biology
and then I was looking for graduate programs and I wanted an opportunity where I could
explore a lot of different things, and I did my first rotation in a neuroscience laboratory
that studied Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease and the intersection of those really
challenging disease problems with very interesting biological questions about how the brain works,
how our minds develop from this huge collection of cells, that sort of where I really, where
things really got moving for me in terms of my personal interests.
Autism is a disorder of social communication and the ability to control repetitive or restrictive
behaviors or interests.
The families that are affected need a tremendous amount of assistance and the children need
ongoing support.
Even high functioning autistic children will need lifelong support to be able to, to function,
to function normally.
Hey Mark.
How's it goin?
When I get in, in the morning, one of the first things I like to do, is working on the
microscope we have a lot of image based experiments that we're working on where we're trying to
describe the morphology of neurons either in the brain or in culture.
I'm trying to find a nice looking neuron that we can see clearly the uptake of transferrin.
When a cell is pulling in materials from outside of itself and taking them up into, into the
interior of the cell.
So all of that image I generate a huge pile of images and they also need to be analyzed
so a big part of my day is also image analysis.
Where we're using software to describe the shape and size and location of these different
structures within the cells.
Can you, can you switch to just the red channel for me for a second?
Okay, so it's interesting this, this cell had some uptake but not a whole lot.
you can see the cells around it were really pulling in a lot more.
When we see these images and we're, we know that the experiments are working and we know
that we're getting good data it's really satisfying.
Because we're going to be able to answer the questions that we're asking about how these
neurons function normally.
And then also how they're functions are disrupted in the, in the disease model that we're studying.
Everyday is different, everyday is a challenge.
The, the work that we do is asking and answering very interesting questions and getting at
cutting edge things that we don't understand.
There's the, the brain how it works, how it functions is, is a very mysterious thing.
It's considered to be one of the most complicated structures in all of the universe.
The number of potential variables there is, is so high, and the, the challenge of trying
to figure out how even one small piece of that works is, is very, very exciting.
It's a very exciting opportunity to, to be part of.
Yeah I come in everyday and I have a long list of, of challenging things to do, and
it's a, it's a fun way to work.
And I depend on the help of my colleagues in the lab to, to be effective.
There's a lot of division of labor that has to have, it's definitely a team effort.
I need to make sure that we can get images.
And you don't have microscope time today but later in the week, is that right?
[Speaker 2:] Thursday.
[Speaker 1:] Thursday.
We hope that we can extend that information to, to describe how disorders like intellectual
disability and autism develop in general.
By understanding more about the biology of those disorders we can move towards treatments
and therapies that can, can potentially really help people and meeting that challenge in
the next decade, two decades is gonna require more manpower, more talent, more energy, more
enthusiasm from more people to, to make it happen.
If you work hard things are gonna work out for you, I really believe that, and so stay
focused, keep working, keep trying to learn and, and develop, and grow, and, and build
all of that on a base of hard work.