My PI’s name is Dr. Christina Williams, and I was one of her students last semester in Neuro 101 course. Dr. Williams got her B.A. in Biology and Psychology at Williams College in 1975 and went to Rutgers University Institute of Animal Behavior to further her study in Neuroendocrinology. As a graduate student, she was interested in how hormones modify the behavior of organisms and studied lots of different animals from ringdoves and seagulls to rats and mice. She was also particularly interested in the role of neurotransmitters and completed her dissertation on the development of “feeding” in animals – how babies start out by suckling and move on to eating solid food (are they using the same brain mechanism?). She manipulated different neurotransmitters to see if by blocking one of them would stop the suckling behavior, and she was later able to find out that suckling and feeding use two very different mechanisms. Dr. Williams was also interested in the patterns of behavior like lordosis and ear wiggling (sex behaviors in rats) and the effects of hormones before and after puberty in these animals.
Dr. Williams went to Johns Hopkins University for her Postdoctoral fellowship in psychology, psychiatry, and neurochemistry in 1979-1981 to continue on with her studies in suckling and feeding behaviors in animals. After her postdoctoral fellowship, she taught neuroscience at Columbia University for about 12 years.
Outside of academic life, Dr. Williams enjoys the theatre, and she was involved in a lot of acting, singing, and dancing on the stage before and during her early years in college. Having lived in New York, she had interesting experiences with meeting some of her favorite actors/actresses, including Woody Allen and Katherine Hepburn.
Since Dr. Williams works with animals in her research/lab, she remembers many disasters. One of them happened when she was in Columbia; she taught a neuroscience course with a lab and she was showing her students how to dissect the sheep brain. When the students were gathered around her, one of her students fainted and the student had to be taken to the hospital. Thankfully, the student was fine after the accident and came back to finish the semester. Dr. Williams also has a lot of episodes of small disasters including mice/rat bites during visitor tour through the animal facility, and baby mice and bedding flying across the room trying to shake off the mice and the cage on her finger! (Ouch.)
After the “interview”, I had a chance to talk with Professor Williams for a couple more hours in her office talking about her other life experiences and my possible career path, and I had a great opportunity to get to know her more outside of the academic context!
