What on earth is a systems neuroscientist?
We scientists sure love our jargon, don’t we? But don’t worry, in case “systems” makes you think of the operating system on your computer, or the social systems that shape our daily lives, that’s not quite what we mean here.
Neuroscience is a vast field with many, many subdivions. One of those is systems neuroscience: the study of how the different parts of the brain and nervous system function together. How networks of neurons (and the other many equally fascinating cell types that surround them) communicate to give rise to everything: from movement and memory to perception and emotion.
… and how did I become one?
This is where you might expect a neat account of “how I knew at an early age that this was exactly the branch of science I wanted to get into”, but alas, real life is often messier than that.
If you’d haphazard a guess that I was already a nerdy child, you would be right. (Everyone goes through a dinosaur phase though, right?) But I grew up in Luxembourg, and being a scientist was not a thing I knew I could become, so I came to science via the scenic route.
From dreams of medicine to developmental neurobiology…
I did my undergraduate degree in Biomedical Sciences at the University of Edinburgh – not that I actually applied to that program. You see, I was one of the many “oooh you got so close!” rejects to their medicine degree that got offered a consolation spot in the Biological Sciences department instead. I accepted, thinking I’d transition to medicine anyway, but after those hopes got squashed, I’d already fallen in love with Scotland and living in Edinburgh, so decided to stick it out with the degree I’d enrolled in anyway.
I guess you already know the next plot-twist – I discovered just how much fun and exciting science and research can be, and I never looked back at medicine after that.
I didn’t go right into systems neuroscience though – I guess I’m just too fond of the scenic routes.
Instead, my first love was developmental neurobiology. It all started with an essay on Sonic Hedgehog… I kid you not. Shh (the scientific abbreviation for Sonic hedgehog, the molecule) is important during many different processes during embryogenesis; one of them being the development of the spinal chord (which was the topic of the essay I wrote).
… to finding luck on the other side of the world…
I then went on exchange to the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia (told you, I’m fond of scenic routes) – which I chose purely because it was close to the beach btw – where I had the incredibly good fortune of doing a research module under a mentor who invited me to co-author a peer-reviewed publication with him. And thus I went back to my final year in Edinburgh with my first publication under my belt, which back in those days, was a rare thing. (The publication was about how a particular type of genetic material called RNA forms 3-D structures and how that impacts their function. Still not even close to systems neuroscience – cause you know, scenic routes.)
I completed my Honours year, won some awards, and then embarked on a 4-year PhD programme at UCL, where the first year consisted of some courses and three rotations in different Neuroscience labs.
… to the scientists who made me fall in love with a new field…
In one of these courses, my future PhD advisor gave a lecture that made quite an impression on me. Ironically, I don’t remember the actual contents of it – but I do remember how I felt afterwards: the questions he asked were exactly the ones that had been swirling in my head but that I didn’t know how to put into words yet. One of my fellow students later said she had a feeling after that lecture that I’d end up doing my PhD with this advisor. A visit to the lab cemented the idea – my future co-advisor noticed how my eyes lit up when he showed me around the microscopes and explained what they could do. I did my third rotation project with them and stayed on for my PhD: I had finally arrived in the land of systems neuroscience.
… to a new dream of combining both worlds…
I loved my PhD, and I could not have asked for more wonderful advisors and a more supportive environment as a budding scientist.
There is a reason I still call myself a systems neuroscientist – it is my favourite way of looking at how the brain works – but my love for developmental neurobiology also remained. I longed for a way to combine the two, which is why I changed tracks again after my PhD.
I had an idea, I had a plan, and I had found new advisors, ready to support it. My first attempt at this research project started just before the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and after one of my advisors was prompted to relocate and leave academia, I had to find a new home for my ideas. Still in the midst of the ongoing madness of the pandemic, I tried to get my project off the ground for a second time, in a new lab, but whether it was a weird form of long-covid or something else, my head decided it was time for the biggest not-so-scenic break yet.
... to a dream cut short by a world of pain
I was hit by chronic migraine.
The experiments I’d once dreamed of doing were repeatedly thrown off track by ever more frequent and severe migraine attacks. Weeks of work were lost, the joy I’d previously felt doing my work was replaced by pain and dread.
The decision to quit science is probably the hardest I’ve made in my life so far. I know it might sound crazy, but from those second-year undergraduate days of delving into the wonders of neurobiology, all I’ve wanted to do was science. Science is far from a perfect enterprise – there are many jaded academics out there, and for good reason unfortunately; the system could really do with an update – but somehow it never stopped being worthwhile to me. I found that quiet wonder every time I looked down a microscope or plotted a graph with new results – and the thought of giving that up was painful.
But given the actual pain I was in because of the migraines (I scored three times the minimum score for severely disabled at some point), I wasn’t really able to keep going.
And so my life changed, and I plunged into an unknown future.
I may not be where I thought I’d be, but I like to think of myself as “taking the scenic route”, yet again. One day, I hope to return to science and academia in some form, but for now, I’m in no rush. I’m actually doing quite ok right now. My migraines are manageable, and this entire ordeal made me want to use my skills in a whole new way.
In a weird way, I may have accidentally found myself on the most scenic route thus far – and right now I feel like it would be a shame to cut it short. I don’t know yet where it will take me, but I know I’ll know when I’ve arrived.
Publications
For a succinct list, see Google Scholar.
For a little bit of background for each publication, read below!
On systems neuroscience
Why exactly did I fall in love with systems neuroscience?
There are so many levels at which you can study the brain – from genes and molecules to individual cells, neural circuits, and whole brain regions. I found them all fascinating and I had no idea how to pick one. To make things even more complicated, I also loved psychology.
What I really wanted was to bring biology and behaviour together, and when I discovered systems neuroscience, I found my “how”. It sits right in the middle of that hierarchy: close enough to connect to the microscopic world of cells and molecules, yet big enough to link to the behaviour we see in everyday life.
Besides, the technology is just cool. There’s nothing quite like watching brain cells light up in real time as an animal moves or makes a decision.
Within this broad field, my work focused on how the cortex (the wrinkly outer layer of the brain) processes sensory information, like light and sound, to guide movement and decision-making.
Without further ado, here’s a closer glimpse into my work:
- Cortical state fluctuations during sensory decision-making.
Current Biology, 30, 4944-4955.
Elina A. K. Jacobs, Nicholas A. Steinmetz, Andrew J. Peters, Matteo Carandini, Kenneth D. Harris (2020)
Pubmed PDF preprint
Just like we go through different behavioural states during the day – sleeping, eating, moving, working – our brains do too. These states are reflected in patterns of activity; in particular oscillations at different frequencies, that neuroscientists call brain states.
How does the brain switch between these states when we’re engaged in a task? Is it like flipping a switch – one state on, another off – or do they blend into each other through smooth change?
I trained mice to perform visual and auditory tasks, and whilst it was a running joke in the lab that I was studying “what happens when mice zone out”, the fact that they did ended up providing some useful data! It showed that the brain’s rhythms change most strongly with engagement (how motivated and attentive the mice were), not just performance or accuracy.
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Because science is a team effort, I contributed to a couple of other projects too.
- High-yield methods for accurate two-alternative visual psychophysics in head-fixed mice.
Cell Reports, 20, 2513-2524.
Christopher P. Burgess, Armin Lak, Nicholas A. Steinmetz, Peter Zatka-Haas, Charu Bai Reddy, Elina A. K. Jacobs, Jennifer F. Linden, Joseph J. Paton, Adam Ranson, Sofia Soares, Sylvia Schröder, Miles J. Wells, Lauren E. Wool, Kenneth D. Harris, Matteo Carandini (2017)
Pubmed PDF preprint
This is the project that established the task I used in my own PhD, and later became the basis on which many experiments within the International Brain laboratory (an international multi-lab effort) are based. Fun fact: I was the very first guinea-pig who tested the new software that would run these experiments!
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- Aberrant neocortical activity in certain GCamp6-expressing transgenic mice.
eNeuro, 0207-17.2017.
Nicholas A. Steinmetz, Christina Buetfering, Jerome Lecoq, Christian R. Lee, Andrew J. Peters, Elina A. K. Jacobs, Philip Coen, Douglas R. Ollerenshaw, Matthew T. Valley, Saskia E. J. De Vries, Marina Garrett, Jun Zhuang, Peter A. Groblewski, Sahar Manavi, Jesse Miles, Casey White, Eric Lee, Fiona Griffin, Joshua D. Larkin, Kate Roll, Sissy Cross, Thuyanh V. Nguyen, Rachael Larsen, Julie Pendergraft, Tanya Daigle, Bosiljka Tasic, Carol L. Thompson, Jack Waters, Shawn Olsen, David J. Margolis, Hongkui Zeng, Michael Hausser, Matteo Carandini, Kenneth D. Harris (2017)
Pubmed PDF preprint
Modern bioengineering is one of my absolute favourite fields of neuroscience (as a spectator – I deeply admire the researchers who have required the patience and skill, which I very much lack).
One of their marvels is the creation of a molecule that uses the brain’s own chemistry to produce a fluorescent signal – bright enough for microscopes to detect – and that glows in tune with a neuron’s activity. (It is one of the coolest inventions of the last two decades in my humble opinion.)
But experimenting by necessity involves disturbing the system you’re observing. In this case, the molecule turned out to interfere with the cells’ chemistry a bit more than expected – sometimes even triggering epileptic-like activity. A classic accidental discovery -though perhaps not an entirely surprising one when you’re tinkering with brain chemistry. Oops.
These mishaps happenin science, and the best we can do is share what we learn. So we published our findings to help others avoid the same pitfall.
Fruits of my postdoctoral labour
The journey after my PhD didn’t unfold quite as planned – interrupted first by the pandemic, and a second time by chronic migraine – but I learned a lot of things that still shape the way I think about science.
I’m particularly proud of the mini-review I wrote, into which I poured a lot of my thoughts on individuality:
- Larval zebrafish as a model for studying individual variability in translational neuroscience research.
Frontiers in Behavioural Neuroscience, 17:1143391.
Elina A. K. Jacobs & Soojin Ryu (2023)
Pubmed PDF
I argue that embracing variability, rather than averaging it away, can reveal insights into how neural circuits give rise to behaviour in different ways, and how this might inform more personalised approaches to treating brain disorders.
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In my first project, I worked in a lab that developed a new method that allows studying gene expression, cell activity and brain connectivity all at once. I was excited about this because it had the potential to bring together several of my interests: systems neuroscience, developmental neurobiology and genetics. I had ambitious plans on how to use this method in juvenile fish (this was the developmental aspect) through a collaboration with another lab – but alas, those fruits were never born.
- Combined transcriptomic, connectivity, and activity profiling of the medial amygdala using highly amplified multiplexed in situ hybridization (hamFISH).
eLife, 14:RP105388
Mathew D Edwards, Ziwei Yin, Risa Sueda, Alina Gubanova, Chang S Xu, Virág Lakner, Megan Murchie, Chi-Yu Lee, Kristal Ng, Karolina Farrell, Rupert Faraway, Subham Ganguly, Elina Jacobs, Bogdan Bintu, Yoh Isogai (2025)
Full Text preprint
Since I was quite comfortable with programming from my PhD, I helped develop the analysis code for this project.
From the scenic route
Given my love for psychology, I briefly worked in cognitive neuroscience – the branch of neuroscience closest to psychology.
That project taught me a lot: I wrote my first bits of code, and realised just how much the brain is still developing during adolescence. (Makes it a lot easier to not get insulated by teenagers: their prefrontal cortices – ie the parts of the brain that enable things like long-term planning, thinking about the consequences of one’s actions, and how other people are feeling – are undergoing majour re-construction.) You can watch a great TED talk by my advisor on this topic here.
In the study I worked on, we looked at how teenage brains process risk when influenced by their peers versus adults:
- Neural correlates of social influence on risk perception during development.
Social Neuroscience, 15, 355-367.
Lisa J. Knoll, Annie Gaule, Alberto Lazari, Elina A. K. Jacobs, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore (2020)
Pubmed PDF
Last but not least, here is that very first publication from my undergraduate studies; the one I wrote at UNSW in Australia:
- The role of RNA Structure in Posttranscriptional Regulation of Gene Expression.
Journal of Genetics and Genomics, 39, 535-543.
Elina Jacobs, James D. Mills & Michael Janitz (2012)
Pubmed PDF
It’s a little dive into how RNA (a type of genetic material) forms 3-D structures and how those 3-D structures impact how genes are expressed. (Up until this point, people liked to primarily look at RNA function from a 2-D lense. I tried to make the case that the 3-D structures are also important.)
Teaching
There is no better way to deepen your understanding of a topic than to teach it imo! When you’re trying to explain a complex concept to someone else, you discover your own gaps in understanding, and are pushed to find clearer, simplier ways to formulate your thoughts.
That’s a big part of why I love teaching – another being that I genuinely love nerding out about the topics that fascinate me and sharing how exciting science can be.
I’ve dabbled in tutoring throughout my studies, and worked as a teaching assistant for undergraduate courses while doing my PhD. All of these experiences helped me discover the joy in teaching, but the most exciting project I’ve been involved with so far has been Neuromatch Academy.
Neuromatch Academy
Born during the Covid-19 pandemic, this fully online summer school set out to make cutting-edge neuroscience accessible when in-person teaching wasn’t possible. In doing so, it sparked a much larger mission: bringing high-level science education to anyone, anywhere in the world.
I joined the very first cohort in 2020 as a Teaching Assistant, later returning as a group project mentor (2021–2022) and Lead Teaching Assistant (2023). Teaching groups of students from all around the world has been incredible every single time.
Seeing what’s possible when science is shared openly across borders has been deeply inspiring – and has helped shape my own vision for how to use the internet to make science, and in particular health insights we can derive from it, accessible to those who need it.
Social media
I’ve been experimenting with new ways to share science in accessible ways, one of them being through my Instagram account. From busting neuroscience myths to a series on yoga and the nervous system, you can follow me @neurelinayoga here.
For more details on my teaching & science communication activities
For a full account of my teaching & science communication experience, see pages 5-6 of my academic CV.
Some moments of pride
Standing on the shoulders of giants…
I know it’s a cliché but it’s true – no one achieves anything alone (and don’t let anyone try to tell you otherwise).
I’m so grateful to all the amazing mentors and colleagues I’ve had during my scientific journey – I would not still have a sparkle in my eyes when talking about science without them.
Thanks to their support, I’ve been fortunate to receive some recognition for my work too:
- 2013–2018: Wellcome Trust PhD Studentship, University College London, UK
- 2016: FENS / IBRO-PERC / Brain Prize Stipend, FENS Brain Conference, Denmark
- 2014: UCL Graduate School Bursary, to attend the Cheltenham Science Festival
- 2013: British Neuroscience Association Undergraduate Award
- 2010: James Rennie Bequest Award, for participation in a Marine Conservation Expedition in Madagascar with Blue Ventures
I’m grateful for each new adventure these enabled – and for the reminder that curiosity, when nurtured, can open doors you didn’t even know existed.