NOTE time, location

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 7 to hear Catherine Dulac share her story. This will be an in-person event. 

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

Official Story:

Catherine Dulac is the Samuel W. Morris University Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator.

Dr. Dulac’s work focuses on understanding brain mechanisms underlying the control of social behaviors in mammals. Her research has helped decipher the unique characteristics of social recognition, including the sensory cues that trigger distinct social behaviors, the nature and identity of social behavior circuits in males and females and their modulation by the animal physiological status. Her work combines cutting edge genetics, transcriptomics, physiology and imaging approaches to uncover the neural basis underlying instinctive social behaviors, a set of brain functions that are typically highly impaired in mental illness.

Dr. Dulac grew up in Montpellier, France, graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, and received her PhD from the University of Paris VI. She was a postdoctoral fellow at Columbia University before joining the faculty of Harvard in 1996. She was Chair of Harvard’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology from 2007 to 2013 and is currently the Samuel W. Morris University Professor. She is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, the French Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. She is She is an Officer of the Legion d’Honneur and a recipient of multiple awards including the Richard Lounsbery Award, the Pradel Research Award, the Ralph W. Gerard Prize (co-recipient with Michael Greenberg), and the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences. She is a member of numerous Scientific Advisory Boards in the US and abroad and served as the Co-Chair of the National Institutes of Health Advisory Committee to the NIH Director (ACD), BRAIN Initiative 2.0 Working Group.

Unofficial Story:

Growing up in Montpellier, a small university town in the South of France, Dr. Dulac split her time devouring books, particularly thick novels from authors all over the world and across historical and prehistorical times, and enjoying the great outdoors, whether sailing on the nearby Mediterranean Sea, or hiking along week-long mountainous trails. Her fascination about lives of the distant past made her dream of becoming a paleontologist, until she realized that it meant spending long hours digging bones with a little brush. Instead, she found great pleasure as a student attending biology and neuroscience classes, which further fed her curiosity about how life works and why people do what they do.

While she consolidated her personal wish to become a scientist, already early on as a high school student, she was also increasingly confronted by advice from teachers and surrounding grownups, who unanimously concurred that becoming a professional researcher was an unreachable goal. Undeterred, she decided to follow her passion for as long as possible and thrived as an undergraduate, then a graduate student working in an experimental developmental neuroscience lab in Paris.

All the while, she was also diving into typical Parisian life with its explosion of great art and music, amazing food and intense social life. During that time, she also discovered and greatly enjoyed being a teaching assistant, which broadened her view of her like as a scientist to combine teaching and research and directly entice younger generations, particularly women and underprivileged students, to gain confidence and follow their passion for science.

Her PhD thesis in Paris started as a long series of experimental failures, until she realized – please note it took a couple of years until it happened!– that it was a good idea to follow experimental protocols. Once this detail was finally acquired, she cherished her training and work as a researcher, although the prospect of becoming a PI still seemed like an unreachable goal. It was in fact only at the very end of her postdoctoral training that she started to conceive herself as the head of her own independent group.

Indeed, a postdoctoral opportunity in New York introduced her to the different styles of scientific and social life in the US, which she ended up adopting after accepting a job offer as an assistant professor at Harvard. Starting her lab was hard but exhilarating work and a life-long learning experience on science, teaching and fruitful interactions with mentees and colleagues. Her long-lasting interest in why people do what they do and why do they like to be together translated into her lab research themes on the neural control of instinctive behaviors and social interactions, first in periphery with the molecular and neural mechanisms of pheromone detection, then more centrally with the identification of cell types and neural circuits controlling distinct social behaviors. As a woman in science, she always thought that investigating the brain of both males and females in equal measure would open interesting new avenues, and even more so after realizing that observing male behavior was long considered to be the main if not sole worthy topic of inquiry.

In addition to the long hours in her lab or reading big books, she loves the outdoors, long runs to refresh her brain (she ran 7 marathons), great walks on the wild seashores of Cape Cod at all seasons, kayaking along the coast, and cooking and eating delicious French food with a nice glass of wine!