Scientist Profile – Professor Chantal Stern
Chantal Stern, D.Phil.
Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Center
Director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Laboratory
Professor Chantal Stern’s research focuses on mapping the human brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with the primary goal of studying how the human brain encodes, stores, and subsequently recognizes visual, spatial, and verbal information.
The Brainbow Bulletin sat with Professor Stern to discuss her research and her journey as a scientist, then concluded with musings on sailing, rescue pets, and the power to shrink and expand time.
Can you briefly describe for me your research and the goals of your lab?
My research is focused on using neuroimaging methods to study the human brain and human cognition. My early work focused on memory, especially long-term and “episodic memory”—those are memories that are personal, occurring at a specific time and location. Lately much of my work focuses on navigation, which has a relationship to memory. What I’ve always wanted to do here at BU is create something where investigators collaborate in a way that helps us understand cognition from the cellular level all the way up to human thought.
Can you offer an example of, say, a research question that threads those levels together?
Sure. That’s how I ended up doing some of my navigation work. As an example of how we link animal studies with human studies, if you were to ask me something about a long-term memory or episodic memory—that is, a memory about myself—I can tell you about it. I can tell you a story about what I did last week, or what I did a month ago, etc. Now, you can’t ask an animal to tell you a story involving personal memory, but the question remains: Does that kind of memory exist in an animal? That’s the sort of question that Professor Howard Eichenbaum, who recruited me to Boston University, was very interested in. How could we determine whether a rat’s memory system functioned in ways similar to a human. A lot animal research is conducted within the framework of navigation, which is how I started looking at navigation in humans.
Can you describe a recent study?
We’re currently running a set of navigation studies using a virtual foraging task, which is very similar to animal foraging tasks. Another study that we just published examines the interactions between memory and attentional systems. A graduate student in my lab, Kylie Isenburg, re-analyzed an existing set of neuroimaging data to study network-level activity in the brain when people were doing a long-term memory guided attention task compared to a task driven purely by attention to an external stimulus. The brain processes information differently depending on whether it is responding to internal thoughts, like a memory, versus an external stimulus. An external stimulus that motivates you to get up from your chair could be, for instance, a fire alarm, whereas an internal stimulus might be you simply deciding, okay, I’m going to get myself a sandwich now, and remembering the kind of sandwich I enjoyed yesterday. Our study results showed that different brain networks shift their connectivity based on whether attention was driven by a memory or an external stimulus, and how this large-scale network connectivity is important for the integration of external information with internal memories.
How did you come to specialize in cognitive neuroimaging research?
My DPhil at Oxford was in experimental psychology using animal models. I knew that I wanted to shift towards studying human cognition, and some of my early work involved neuroimaging techniques like positron emission tomography (PET) imaging. Eventually I began working at Harvard and at the Martinos Center at MGH, where I was the first neuroscientist on the team that developed fMRI. At the time I joined, the team’s feeling was, “We think this imaging technique could have important applications for studying the brain, but we really don’t know, and we’re not neuroscientists.” And yes, it turns out that fMRI has become a hugely important technique for studying the human brain, in part because it is truly noninvasive. Consider PET imaging, for instance, where you have to either be injected or inhale a radioisotope to be scanned. An fMRI scan, on the other hand, detects changes in blood-oxygen levels in the brain. For instance, as you listen to me talking right now, there is a change in the level of blood oxygenation in the parts of your brain involved in language, comprehension, attention, and memory. The fMRI scan can detect the changes in those areas.
What are some of your favorite activities or hobbies outside of science?
I grew up on the water, so I’m a sailor. I also love just being outdoors. I love plants and animals. I have done animal rescue my entire life, so I’ve had huge numbers of pets ranging from the standard dogs and cats to rescue raccoons, squirrels, geese, a chinchilla, and parakeets.
If you could have a superpower, what would it be?
I would want the ability to expand time or shrink time. For instance, if I were caught in a situation that was really boring, I could make it go by very quickly, whereas if I wanted a certain experience to last longer, I could slow time down.
*This interview was conducted and edited by Jim Cooney.