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Growing Up In Science (GUIS) is a series dedicated to sharing the personal narratives of scientists, with a focus on the hidden challenges of becoming and being a scientist throughout all stages of one’s career.

Please join us on Thursday, March 14 to hear Martha Bagnall share her story. This will be an in-person event.

Full schedule, Growing Up In Science

If you have questions or are interested in getting involved, please contact Julia Pai.

Official Story

Martha Bagnall is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Washington University. Following a major in biology at Yale University, she worked as a lab technician for two years with Dr. Thomas Carew, studying the role of protein synthesis in learning and memory in the sea slug Aplysia. She earned her Ph.D. from the lab of Dr. Sascha du Lac (Salk Institute / UC San Diego), where as an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, she used electrophysiology and anatomy to characterize the neurons and synaptic connections of the mouse vestibular brainstem.

She then moved into a postdoc in the lab of Dr. Massimo Scanziani (UC San Diego), where she used a combination of physiology and calcium imaging to define the subcellular structure of thalamocortical synaptic connections in mouse barrel cortex. In her second postdoc, she joined the lab of Dr. David L. McLean (Northwestern University), where she transitioned to studying spinal circuits in the larval zebrafish, earning an NIH K99/R00 award in the process. She began her own lab at Washington University in 2015, where she combines her interests in sensory and motor circuit function. Martha is the recipient of a Sloan Fellowship, a Pew Scholar Award, and a McKnight Scholar Award. She co-organized a conference on motor control in St. Andrews in 2023, and was recently appointed as a standing member of the NIH Sensory Motor Neuroscience study section.

Unofficial Story

This is not the story of someone who wanted to be a scientist from an early age. In fact, I spent most of my childhood with plans to be a veterinarian, inspired by the James Herriot books with their vision of a windswept Yorkshire. Possibly the scenery appealed to me from the 18th story of the Manhattan apartment where I grew up. In any case, although I enjoyed summer jobs working in vets’ offices, at some point I heard a vet exclaim, “I don’t want to do another fucking spay!” and realized instantly that I did not want to be saying that myself in 20 years.

I had spent a gap year between high school and college working in a developmental genetics lab at Oxford. This sounds very fancy, but the reality is that I got waitlisted at Yale, and then they offered me the somewhat odd solution of matriculating a year later. I think this was a trial program from the admissions office, and they killed it shortly afterwards, which I mostly don’t take personally. I was torn between matriculating at U Chicago versus taking the gap year, and my parents put their thumb on the scale. It coincided with a year that my father, then a professor of history and classics at Columbia, was spending in Oxford; hence the year working in a lab there.

This experience left me with the firm conviction that I did not want to be a scientist. The three-letter-acronym salad of gene names was impenetrable, and each day seemed filled with failure. To my dismay, most of the time was spent trying to figure out why assays that absolutely should work, didn’t. Though I had hoped to like science research, because I recognized that a career in it would let me combine my broad interests in science, writing, travel, and puzzles, I finished out that year knowing that it wasn’t for me. Once the veterinary aspirations collapsed a year later, I was adrift.

As a college sophomore, I enrolled in a neurobiology class which reignited my interest in biology. I tremendously enjoyed my first experience reading primary literature in a senior seminar on learning and memory with Tom Carew, and when he offered me a job in his lab which he was moving to UC Irvine that summer, I leapt at it. Also, I wanted to move to California. I had a great time learning fine dissection of the Aplysia prep and being immersed in the intellectual life of the lab, but still didn’t see a future career in science. After a couple of years, I applied to graduate school because it seemed to be the thing to do, but I planned to become a science writer. The only inkling I had that this might not be my future direction was that right at the end of my time in Tom’s lab, I started to learn electrophysiology and truly loved it. Even though experiments never worked, just as in my time in developmental genetics, I got immense satisfaction from being at the rig and seeing real live synapses from my paired recordings. It was the first time that I wanted to stay in lab past 5 pm.

I was fairly set on Sascha du Lac’s lab from the beginning, because I loved her approach to look at really tight connections between circuits and behavior, something I’d enjoyed in Aplysia and hadn’t seen much of elsewhere. Plus, the lab was a blast, with a set of phenomenal women who would later go on to independent careers (Alexandra Nelson; Aryn Gittis; Lauren McElvain). I read lots of papers and took pleasure in putting the puzzle pieces together. Still, I continued to be easily frustrated by the daily experience of failure, and I didn’t really get much done for a while.

At the end of the first year, I started dating my now-husband, Edward Han. He was a couple of years ahead of me in the grad program and was regularly working much longer hours in lab than I was. Because I was waiting to go home with him at the end of the day, I ended up working longer hours in lab as well. This sounds very stupid to say, but it was the first time I discovered that I could get a lot better at bench science by….practicing it more. And it was a virtuous cycle: once I developed my skills, of course I found benchwork more enjoyable, so I spent more time doing it!

From that point forward, the science came a lot more readily, since I’d already been a keen reader and writer. I had the thrill of seeing some piles of data turn into interesting papers once we had put them in the context of the literature; to this day, I mostly approach science by thinking that a particular experiment would be interesting, even if I don’t have a clear hypothesis, and working out what to say about it afterwards. I gained a great deal of perspective from a postdoc with Massimo Scanziani, even though some of that perspective was that the cortex is a ridiculous place to look if you were interested in behavior. But the science was so high quality that I learned from being in lab every day, and the experience sharpened my understanding of circuits and synapses in ways that continue to benefit me.

The move into zebrafish was wholly unintentional. Ed and I were trying to find a place to move for postdocs, and he really wanted to work with Nelson Spruston at Northwestern. I’d struggled to find something that would work for me. I had done one of David McLean’s postdoc papers as a journal club that year, so when I saw that he was new faculty at Northwestern, I thought it was worth a try. We arranged to meet at SFN in Chicago; I was 8 weeks postpartum from our first kid, trying to stay upright at my own poster while taking pumping breaks. When Dave and I sat down for coffee, my main goal was to determine if he was a jerk or not, because I thought his science was interesting and in any case, I figured that zebrafish would be a fun thing to do for a couple of years before returning to mouse research like a normal person. Indeed, Dave is a wonderful person, so I agreed to join his lab on the spot. I showed up a year or so later, having never actually seen a zebrafish before.

I spent a terrific three years there, surrounded by amazing lab mates and department colleagues, and learning that in fact, I was going to love being a zebrafish researcher. The zebrafish gave me the accessibility and stereotyped nervous system that I had been missing ever since my Aplysia days, the direct connections between physiology and behavior that got me most excited about science, and of course, great opportunities for in vivo recordings of synaptic connections. It also offered a chance to approach spinal circuits in a very different way than the current mouse work, which was dominated by developmental genetics (which I have still never learned to like).

So, a haphazard path, with many of the crucial turns dominated by considerations that didn’t have much to do with science (I wanted to live in California! I had a boyfriend! I was too tired to interview for more postdocs!). Though I was wrong about most of my predictions, scientific and otherwise, it’s funny to me that as a 17-year-old, I could tell that research would be a good fit for my interests; but then pursued a range of alternatives before almost unintentionally ending up as a scientist.