"Speaker 1: My name is Michael Akins, we're in the biology department of Drexel University,
in the Papadakis Integrated Sciences building.
So my lab studies how the brain changes in response to interactions with the environment
and how these go, how these changes are misregulated in autism models like fragile
x syndrome.
So we study a disease called Fragile X Syndrome and this is the most common form, in humans,
of autism. The goal one day of developing therapies or research at least of influencing
developing therapies that might help these patients.
I was born in California, I grew up in a military family, one of seven kids so we moved around
a little bit, a lot of my life was spent on the East Coast. So I've always really enjoyed,
not just wanting to know how something happens but really trying to understand the whys underneath
it.
When I was young, this led to just sort of exploring the woods around the house. That
curiosity of why things are happening, that carries over into how I also look at the brain.
The motivation for me to get into this line of research was an interest in the basic science,
the trying to understand how different neurons talk to each other and how they change how
they talk to each other over time.
And that was the question that really grabbed by interest and then it became quite clear
that this was something that was not working quite right in the autistic brain and the
Fragile X brain.
The overall mission of our lab is to understand how when something happens to you, when you
have an experience as an individual, there's something that happens in the brain that changes
how you respond to future events and a lot of that has to do with changing how the proteins
that are in the neurons, so we're trying to understand those changes.
That's my mission in this, is to hopefully understand the basic level and to understand
really how the brain works, but to also someday hopefully understand how these processes that
we're studying in the normal brain, how they'reâ€¦how they go awry in the autistic brain.
Curing autism would be fantastic; some of these patients are more or less fine. But
some are really severely impacted with the inability to communicate via language or recurrent
seizures that affect them on a regular basis, and I think those are the aspects that we'd
like to help with.
Every day if I can, I walk through the lab and I talk to people and see how their experiments
are going and try to help them if they've gotten stuck; participate in that aspect of
the discovery process.
The thing that I love most about the job and about science in general is the discovery
process, the fact that you get to look at something that maybe a million people have
looked at before, but you're going to look at it in a different way. And you're going
to ask a question that no one has asked before to try to learn more about that.
There's this interesting aspect where you get to pick the question, so you get to decide
what it is that interests you and you then have to go and you have to convince other
people that it's interesting. But there is a level of control but also engagement that
comes with being the one deciding what problem you're working on. It's one that motivates
you because deep down, at its very core, it's something that really really excites you.
We're going to learn hopefully in my lab, details of how the brain that people aren't
doing and that's what excites me."