From Biomedical Engineering to the Brain’s Motor Circuits: The Journey of Mike Economo
Born in Danville, a small town in Southern Virginia, to Canadian parents of Greek heritage, Dr. Economo moved to Durham, North Carolina, during his teenage years, a move that ultimately placed him on his academic journey.
Dr. Economo was surrounded by a significant scientific and academic community. He attended Duke as an undergraduate, earning degrees in both math and biomedical engineering. This experience provided him with the opportunity to analyze biology through the lenses of systems, design, math and problem-solving.
It was during his initial studies in biomedical engineering that Dr. Economo became fascinated by neuroscience. Still full of mysteries, he saw the growing field of neuroscience as a way to study the most complicated system in biology (the brain) while also making valuable contributions to questions concerning human health.
This curiosity led him to pursue graduate school here at Boston University, where he began to study neuronal biophysics and its link to brain oscillations under the advisement of Professor John White, ultimately earning a PhD in Biomedical Engineering. His doctoral research was firmly rooted in fundamental neuroscience, focusing on the brain at the cellular level. During his postdoctoral work, he transitioned to studying the brain at the systems level, focusing first on sensory systems and then on motor systems. “Basic research is critical,” says Dr. Economo. “Neurological problems are notoriously hard to address, in large part because we don’t have a good understanding of the brain at a basic level.”
During his postdoctoral research, Dr. Economo developed new technologies for imaging the brain at unprecedented scale and resolution. Dr. Economo used this technology to examine the pyramidal tract, one of the largest pathways in the mammalian brain. The pyramidal tract connects the cerebral cortex – the newly evolved part of the brain – to the other evolutionarily older parts of the brain and spinal cord. The pyramidal tract has been of intense interest to researchers for many decades because it plays a central role in behavior and because its degeneration leads to ALS and FTD, devastating neurological conditions affecting more than a million people worldwide. Dr. Economo’s research revealed its structure in unprecedented detail, revealing that the pyramidal tract is two separate pathways with different functions.
Now as a BU faculty member and the head of the Economo Lab, Dr. Economo and his team continue to study how the mammalian motor system functions and are to developing new technologies to push forward neuroscience research forward.
One recent goal of the Economo Lab has been to examine how specific circuits within the brain collaborate to convert information into physical actions. At what point does the brain determine which circuits to activate? At what point does the brain make a transition from one form of movement to another? What happens during the adaptation process to changing environmental conditions? These questions may sound simple, but they touch upon the very core of neuroscientific mysteries.
Dr. Economo explains movement as one of the clearest ways to understand what the brain is built to do. “The brain allows us to think, feel, plan, remember, and decide, but at the end of the day, much of its work is expressed through action. A person speaks. A child learns to walk. A hand reaches for an object. A body adjusts its balance on an icy sidewalk. Each of these actions depends on many parts of the brain working together in a coordinated and flexible way,” he explains.
Now, the Economo Lab is largely dedicated to the neural circuits that control orofacial movements. Those are movements of the parts of your body above the shoulders – your head, neck, and face. Although we may not think about them as often as movements of our limbs, orofacial movements are most critical for our quality of life. They allow us to breathe, eat, drink, swallow, speak, direct our eyes, and show emotion. When neurological disorders disrupt these systems, the consequences can be severe, affecting perception, communication, independence, and survival. “And through knowledge of how motor circuits normally function, researchers can understand what goes wrong in conditions such as ALS, Parkinson’s disease, and other movement disorders,” Dr. Economo says.
Technology development is yet another activity that falls within the scope of the Economo Lab. In order to acutely measure, study and untangle the complex nature of the neural circuits that allow for action selection and movement a variety of diverse methodologies and techniques are employed in the Economo laboratory to answer these questions, such as imaging, high-density electrophysiology (via Neuropixels), genetics, neuroanatomy, behavior, transcriptomics, and computational modeling. Leveraging a broad range of diverse tools and methods is characteristic of Economo’s background in engineering. “The brain is too complicated to be studied from one perspective. Each method reveals a different layer of the system, and together they allow the lab to ask broader and more precise questions.” Dr. Economo explained
However, as neuroscience tools become more sophisticated, the data generated has also become more complex, often creating a need for advanced computational methods to help analyze and interpret what neural circuits are doing and how they do it. For this reason, the Economo Lab sits at the intersection of neuroscience, engineering, computation, and technology development in the spirit of convergent research. This is visible from his immediate collaborations within the BU research community and beyond. He actively works with Jerome Mertz, an optical microscopist, on the development of new imaging technologies for neuroscience. He also collaborates closely with Brian DePasquale, an expert in computational neuroscience and machine learning, with whom he co-mentors graduate students and co-teaches a graduate course in data analysis and machine learning.
Economo also noted projects with Brian Cleary related to data science that use novel tools from molecular genetics to answer questions about systems neuroscience, as well as ongoing projects with Chand Chandrasekaran, Tim O’Shea, and Michael Wallace. Outside of Boston University, Economo’s laboratory is part of a NIH BRAIN Initiative–funded consortium of investigators from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, and the University of California San Diego. This model of team science provides Economo a weekly exchange of ideas and a chance for his laboratory to ask questions and gain insight and knowledge that might not be possible within just one lab or even within one university.
While the work done by Dr. Economo and his team is centered on basic research, the potential translational importance of their studies is not neglected. As Dr. Economo says, “brain disorders including ALS, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and epilepsy have an enormous effect on health care and society but the development of therapies for nearly all brain disorders has been slow. A major reason has been that we do not have a good understanding of how the brain functions.”
On a personal note, he is the father of two young children, and he has found that watching them is extra entertaining from the perspective of a neuroscientist. Children are always developing and learning new ways of interacting and communicating with their environment. For someone who studies how the brain produces action, parenting offers a daily reminder window into the learning process. He also enjoys cooking, traveling, and maintaining his connections to his Greek ancestry, and as a daily routine rides his bike during all seasons from Jamaica Plain to BU, along the Emerald Necklace.
His journey from Danville to Duke, from biomedical engineering to neuroscience, and from BU graduate student to current BU faculty member reflects a scientist drawn to big questions. While the Economo lab studies the neural circuits that control our bodies’ movements, this work is really about something larger: how the brain transforms information, experience and intention into action. It is a strong reminder that every voluntary step, every gesture, every spoken word, and every adjustment to the world around us depends on neural circuits working together with extraordinary precision.