Dr. Rudy Behnia
Assistant Professor of Neuroscience Columbia University
Principal Investigator Columbia, Zuckerman Institute
Postdoctoral Fellow New York University
PhD in Cellular and Molecular Biology Cambridge University
In science, we often follow the well-trodden path – we leverage skills we have already mastered, play to our lab’s strengths, and focus on research topics with a developed background. Dr. Rudy Behnia prefers the road less traveled; she prefers delving into newly formed fields using techniques far out of her comfort zone. She credits her scientific career in part to this willingness to take risks. As an Assistant Professor at Columbia University, Rudy studies sensory perception in flies to understand how the brain integrates visual information differently based on surrounding behavioral context, such as attentional or motivational state.
Rudy describes the path she took to her current role as “non-linear”; this choice of phrasing perhaps betrays an early penchant for mathematics. For her undergraduate education, she chose to study math and physics. In the French system, students can go through two years of preparatory classes (akin to the US’s undergraduate studies) before taking intensive admissions exams for engineering schools. Despite Rudy’s success in this preparatory program, she found the experience isolating – she was one of three women in a class of forty, and the classes required incredibly demanding hours with little support. Her classes were also heavily focused on theory, not the real-world applications of the math she was learning. At the start of her second year, the principal gave a morale-boosting speech in which he called Rudy and her classmates “the elite of France.” Rudy was unsure how she felt about this sentiment; the unsupportive environment made her feel like she didn’t fit into this system that she was supposedly the elite of. She decided to leave the preparatory program, forgoing the stable career path almost guaranteed by her trajectory. The preparatory program increased the likelihood she would be accepted to one of the top engineering schools in France; leaving the program made it more difficult to be admitted into these competitive schools that would increase her chances of finding a secure job.
Despite diverging from her previously established career path, taking this risk led to a new opportunity in biological research, a field she was fascinated by as a high schooler. She returned to college and was accepted into the prestigious Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. She joined a lab studying Rab GTPases, molecules that regulate membrane traffic, and found that she enjoyed the research immensely. As Rudy was nearing the end of her undergraduate degree, she was drawn to the experimental techniques and concepts used in a paper published by a lab in Cambridge that studied yeast membrane trafficking. Rudy, never one to shy away from a new experience, applied to a PhD position in this Cambridge lab led by Dr. Sean Munro and was accepted. While in Dr. Munro’s lab at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology, she investigated the signaling pathways involved in Golgi body processing. The Munro lab was full of international trainees like herself, and she felt both heard and respected in this new collegial environment. Cambridge itself was quaint, and both the lab and town felt like home.
As Rudy was wrapping up her graduate education, she found herself wanting to delve into a completely different topic in her postdoc. She felt the membrane trafficking questions she had studied in graduate school were more about refining already established principles. Instead, she wanted to help break ground on a new principle or concept – to take a risk on a field in its infancy. However, she had not yet decided which field she was interested in, and interviewed in labs that studied everything from development to prions. Dr. Claude Desplan’s lab at NYU was consistently recommended to her as a place where she could pursue riskier projects. The lab also had a work culture that appealed to her; a lab meeting she attended during her interview visit was chaotically collaborative, with everyone chiming in (sometimes at the same time) in a way that felt constructive. For her post-doc in the Desplan lab, Rudy hoped to perform functional imaging in the fly visual system. There was just one problem: the Desplan lab studied the development of cells in the fly eye, not how they functioned once they were mature.
Rudy found a solution in the lab of Dr. Adam Carter, whom she formed a close collaboration with while still in the Desplan lab. Through her collaboration with the Carter lab, she learned several of the skills required for this functional imaging project. She helped build a two-photon microscope, studied optics, and learned to patch neurons. Rudy then applied these methods to her project in the Desplan lab studying how flies detect motion. However, the intellectual isolation inherent in taking on a project very different from one’s colleagues took a toll on Rudy. She did not have proper data throughout the first four years of her postdoc and was questioning whether she should continue. In these stressful times, Rudy was buoyed by her life outside her lab. Pottery, for example, allowed her to feel satisfaction outside of the slower (and less predictable) rate of return in the lab.
Her confidence in her ability to build a fulfilling life, whether in science or in some other career path, was also a wellspring for her mental wellbeing during these more difficult moments in her post-doc. Because her identity was not entirely hinged on her job as a scientist, it was easier to take risks. She prioritized leading a happy and satisfying life and could imagine herself content in many other careers, making challenges in the scientific realm of her life easier to swallow. Eventually, her tenacity during her postdoc paid off. She characterized a circuit with response capabilities that could recapitulate many hallmarks of a motion detection circuit. This was groundbreaking – it provided a cellular basis for a critical neuronal computation. After wrapping up the project, Rudy was offered a professorship at Columbia.
Rudy’s lab is interested in how the brain computes features of the visual scene, such as color or motion, and how visual signals are best encoded to serve specific behaviors. She is also interested in the idea that our perception of visual stimuli is context-dependent, or the idea that which visual information is important to an organism depends on factors like its attentional or motivational state. Rudy wants to understand how such selection of relevant information is computed at the circuit level. To investigate this, Rudy’s lab studies how small neural circuits perform seemingly simple visual computations and how factors like neuromodulation, which is heavily influenced by the organism’s internal state, shift how our brain processes visual information, and the downstream repercussions this has on behavior. As a PI, Rudy prioritizes the happiness of her trainees and a culture of trust. Rudy also stresses the importance of collaborations across labs, which had proved fundamental to her post-doc work and her own research as an independent PI.
Rudy’s unique path to neuroscience has led to, and will continue to lead to, remarkable and creative contributions towards our understanding of perception. Rudy says her path was shaped by a mosaic of the characteristics and ideas from those around her that she found inspiring, rather than any one “ideal” scientist. With her creativity, willingness to take risks, and joie de vivre, Rudy’s approaches to life and science make an enriching contribution to any such mosaic.
Find out more about Rudy and her lab’s research here.
Listen to Leslie’s full interview with Rudy on April 1st, 2022 below!
