Meet a Whitehead Postdoc: Michelle Frank

Michelle Frank is a postdoc in Whitehead Institute Member David Bartel’s lab studying how brain cells regulate RNA to flexibly adapt to different inputs. We sat down with Michelle to learn more about her and her experiences in and out of the lab.

What is the current focus of your research?

Basically, one of the questions that I have been interested in for a long time is understanding how it is that the brain, on a physical level, is able to balance the need to learn new things and adapt to new experiences while maintaining the stable connections required for you to understand and interact with the world around you. With a few minor exceptions, you don’t get any new brain cells once you reach maturity, but you still need to be able to respond to your surroundings, tune things in and out, make new memories, all of this stuff. So I think this balance between stability and flexibility is a really fundamental challenge for many different parts of the nervous system.

One important part of how cells in your brain respond to experiences is by changing the expression of various genes. In all cell types—this isn’t brain specific—DNA templates are made into RNA, and that RNA is used to make new proteins that execute myriad functions within a cell. Every step of this pipeline can be regulated to turn gene expression up or down, which drives changes in how the cell functions. In a neuron, for example, you might alter levels of a protein that changes how strongly that neuron responds to a particular stimulus. However, the RNA level of this DNA–RNA–protein pipeline is particularly understudied in neuroscience, and that RNA regulation is broadly what David Bartel’s lab studies.

There are lots of different ways that RNA molecules are regulated, but right now I’m specifically focused on the role of microRNAs, which are these tiny RNA molecules that drive turnover of other RNAs. Basically, microRNAs can stop other RNAs from being used to make proteins. I’m trying to figure out if there are changes in microRNA levels when you have different kinds of inputs coming into your neurons, and how microRNAs contribute to a neuron’s ability to respond and adapt to these different kinds of inputs.

When you were a little kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?

I mostly wanted to be a writer. I really enjoyed reading books, and thinking about language and how it works. There’s actually somewhat of a linear trajectory from that to what I’m doing now. Those early interests got me really excited about neuroscience, because I was fascinated by the question: how is it that I can say a bunch of words, and then you hear them and they mean something to you? That was my introduction into thinking about how the brain works and how communication works at a physical and biological level. 

What was your path to a career in science?

I went to a smaller college that didn't have a neuroscience major, but I did some classes and some research in neuroscience. I ended up majoring in physics because I thought it was super interesting, and that quantitative way of assessing how the world works has always been really appealing to me. However, I did research in undergrad in cognitive linguistics and auditory neuroscience. Actually, one of my first research experiences was as a summer student in the MSRP program here at MIT, where I worked in a lab that did quantitative modeling of language and communication. I also did some research on auditory navigation behaviors of fish that would make different kinds of vocalizations as part of their mating rituals.

Then I did my PhD in the neuroscience program at Harvard Medical School, in a lab that specialized in the auditory system. My work there was focused on this group of brain cells that take incoming sound information from your ear, integrate it with other information from all over the brain, and then send signals back out to modulate the cells in your ear that sense sound waves. I think most people are familiar with the way that your pupils contract and dilate in changing light, as an example of how you can adapt to different kinds of sensory environments, but most people don't know that there’s something analogous happening in your ear, as well. One of the things we found was that these brain cells help tune your ear so that it can still respond to stimuli after you’ve been exposed to a sound that’s so loud it can cause damage. So if you remove these brain cells in mice and then expose them to a really loud sound, they can’t hear as well afterward as they would be able to with those cells intact.

What drew you to Whitehead Institute? 

As part of my graduate work, I did a lot of single-cell sequencing, a lot of looking at RNA and how it changes in various cells after animals have been exposed to different auditory stimuli. That got me interested in what's happening at a fundamental level: how is this working? I would ask people about these changes in gene expression that were happening on these weird timescales, or these noncoding RNAs that kept showing up, and no one could tell me why or how or what those things were doing. That was why I started looking around for postdoc projects where I could work with more RNA biologists, so I could learn how to find the answers for these questions.

What are your hobbies?

I think the main one is probably reading. My default is contemporary literary fiction, but I do read a lot of nonfiction and some genre fiction. We have a lab fantasy book club, and I read things for that. Whenever I hear about a new book, if it seems interesting, I'll give it a try. I've been teaching myself to read Mandarin, which has been fun. I'd like to eventually be able to actually read books in another language. That's something I’ve been especially enjoying, since I've been interested in linguistics and language for a long time.

Are there musicians or podcasts that you listen to frequently?

Frequently in the lab, I listen to Minnesota public radio. They have a music station that I really like, which is a good venue for finding newer artists. There used to be this really extensive ecosystem of music blogs and music journalism and record shops for sharing recommendations, but I think the current era of the internet and music streaming services have killed off a lot of that. It’s nice that people on public radio still make recommendations.

What is your favorite thing to eat or cook?

Anything made with noodles. I’ll eat Italian noodles, Chinese noodles, and Thai noodles. During the pandemic, when everyone was making sourdough, I was making hand-pulled noodles twice a week. I don't do that as much anymore, because I ate a lot of it and it’s fairly time-consuming—much harder to get done when you’re not stuck at home all day.

Where do you see yourself in ten years?

I don’t know exactly. I would like to do something where I can keep thinking about questions that I think are interesting, important, and that have some impact. There are a lot of different ways that one can do that, and I'm open to different ways of feeding that curiosity. I would also like to be involved in some way in science policy or science communication. I think it's important that people who have scientific training contribute in various ways. It’s hard for me to sit on the sidelines when there are issues in the world that would benefit from expert perspectives, and also, I like doing work that has the possibility of tangible impacts.

How did you become interested in science policy?

When I was in grad school, I did a secondary field in science, technology and society, which is an academic discipline that's focused on thinking about the relationship between scientific research and broader social and political structures. I also co-taught a couple of classes for graduate students focused on questions like what it means for people to have trust in science. What are the best practices in science communication? How do we, as a society, think about what science actually is, what it could be, and how it could be used? How do we choose which problems are interesting and important and worthy of public investment? How does what we discover feed back into policy plans? It was fascinating to think about those issues in the classroom and to help other scientists start grappling with those sorts of questions in a deliberate way, but of course the way you answer those questions also has real-world impacts. The classes I taught introduced me to the Scientific Citizenship Initiative when it was just being formed at Harvard, and I was also really involved in student groups that focused on communication, outreach, and policy. It’s always been important to me to think about how what we do in the lab is shaped by everything around us, and to think about how the work we do at the bench affects society as a whole.