"Speaker 1: My name is Anita Koshy and my lab works on understanding how a common parasite,
toxoplasma gondii persists in the brain of people.
I was born in Albuquerque New Mexico, which I like to refer to as the great state.
My parents were both physicians.
When I was in high school I don't know what I was interested in.
I liked reading, I liked math, I liked soccer, I played soccer most of my life.
But I don't think I had an idea of what a career was.
I certainly knew what being a doctor was because both of my parents were physicians and we
had lots of family friends, but I didn't really have ideas of other careers.
I'm not sure what other careers I considered.
I've just gone along as one does, so it was a bit thick (??). My family situation has
contributed to my becoming a researcher, but they contributed in the fact that my father
was a physician and I could see how much he enjoyed and cared about interacting with his
patients.
And my mom has always just sort of enjoyed the mystery part of medicine and putting things
together which is the research end of things.
I did not always want to be a medical researcher.
I'm a physician and I was pretty determined not to be a physician because my parents are
both Indian, they're both physicians and so I felt like that wouldn't be the right thing
to do.
So I ended up loving research and enjoying taking care of patients as well so I ended
up being a physician researcher.
So I try to understand how this parasite toxoplasma gondin persists in the brain of humans.
And I use that by using a mouse model which is a natural host for toxoplasma.
What I hope to discover by doing this research is both how toxo is able to change the immune
CNS, the brain immune environment and that might give us insights into how to control
that brain immune environment.
Because you can think of the parasite and the brain having co-evolved to tolerate each
other, because about a third of the world we think is infected with toxoplasma.
And so clearly they worked out sort of a deal to allow each other to exist.
So you can use that sort of understanding of what toxoplasma does to persist to potentially
apply to disease processing these where inflammation of the brain is a problem.
And that ranges in everything from multiple chlorosis, to strokes, to Alzheimer's disease.
What I like about doing research is that you get to try different hypotheses and you get
to discover new things about how the world works.
So how does a parasite hang out in the brain?
What cells does it live in?
What cells does it interact with to be able to do that?
How does it influence the brain's immune response?
So I think of research as running into a wall 900 times and then finally getting over it.
And it's when you finally get over that wall then there's a new wall to run into.
But it's really fun to try to think of ways to get over that wall and think about how.
what you find may change the way people think about whatever you're studying.
So what fascinates me about my research is that it lets me bring together two areas I
love.
So infections and the brain.
And working in a lab as an undergrad was a great experience, especially when I found
a good lab.
I loved looking under the microscope and seeing neurons just as they were drawn in textbooks.
That for me is really enjoyable to see how you can impact and improve outcomes in people's
lives.
There is lots of things I like about lab life--interacting with undergrads, interacting with high school
students, my technicians, my graduate students and seeing sort of them develop as people
and as researchers is lots of fun.
It's also amazing to be able to ask questions and come up with ways to answer those questions.
For young people who are considering careers in science, get into a lab because a lot of
times it's the head of the lab or the person with whom you're interacting that determines
whether or not you love the lab.
So if you find the right space where you feel comfortable and enjoy what you're doing, then
it's a great career.
It's hard and it makes you think lots and there are challenges, but the freedom to think
about whatever interests is hard to beat.
And to constantly be interacting with amazing people who love to also think about whatever
interests them and sort of meet at the table is great and hard to beat with any other career."