Bored to sleep by her physical therapy classes, one psychology course at Saint Francis University was all it took for Dr. Jessica Burket to switch majors. Although neuroscience was not a “hot” topic in the field of psychology at the time, the inner workings of the human brain fascinated her.
A first generation college student who grew up in a small town in western Pennsylvania, Burket lept head first into the field by immersing herself in undergraduate research opportunities. The summer of her junior year, she left the comforts of her small university of fewer than 3,000 undergraduates to pursue an internship in D.C. with the Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Burket’s internship gave her both clinical and preclinical experience – working with animal models and people with schizophrenia. By the time she returned to school for her senior year, Burket was hooked.
Instead of going straight to graduate school after obtaining her psychology degree, Burket threw on a white lab coat and returned to the medical center, where she continued working on a new treatment for schizophrenia.
Although many would shudder at the thought of such an intimidating vocation, Burket found herself right at home in the neuropsychopharmacology lab. Despite being a mouthful, she breaks the term down into three simple parts: neuro – meaning the brain, psycho – as in psychology or behavior and pharmacology – the study of drugs. All together, neuropsychopharmacology is the study of how drugs affect behavior in the brain.
Burket originally intended to be a clinical psychologist who works with people, but she found that she enjoyed experimenting in the lab more.
“For me, it was being in the lab and being able to ask questions and think about experiments and conduct experiments,” Burket says when explaining what attracted her to lab life. “That’s what drives me: the questions and trying to figure out the answer to these questions.”
Next, Burket ventured out to Norfolk to help her mentor establish a lab at Eastern Virginia Medical School, where she also pursued her master’s and PhD in biomedical sciences. Burket recalled the preclinical study she conducted as a master’s student that solidified her love of biomedical sciences and convinced her to pursue her PhD.
In the drug study, Burket used mouse models to examine how a novel compound could improve social behaviors relating to autism spectrum disorder.
When Burket uses the term “novel compound,” she is referring to a drug that does not have side effects and does not desensitize the drug-taker over time.
“So it’s only acting when and where you want it to act,” says Burket on her interest in novel medication strategies.
Once a drug is released into one’s system, neurotransmitters bind to receptors or proteins in the brain, However, the brain works in circuits, Burket explains, and the problem with most current drugs is that they don’t target specific circuits – instead the drug affects all the receptors in the brain. The novel medications that interest Burket are more selective about which receptors are stimulated so as to avoid those off-target effects.
In Burket’s study, she examined the brain of a mouse with deficits in the functionality of its NMDA receptors. NMDA receptors are responsible for learning, memory and cognition. Thus, the mouse served as a model of the social deficits typically found in those with autism spectrum disorder. The drug in her study worked by increasing the mouse’s NMDA receptor activation.
Her work on the novel compound for social behaviors relating to autism resulted in clinicians conducting a clinical trial of the novel drug on patients with autism.
“It was really cool to see that the work that you had been doing for several years in the lab – at the bench – translate[s] to the clinic and actually have a clinical study that helped some patients,” Burket says, noting that research and clinical work go hand-in-hand – you can’t have one without the other.
Over the years, Burket has shifted her focus from psychology to molecular biology as she continues to add to a growing list of published research studies.
“It became very clear to me very quickly that if I wanted to be a good scientist, I needed to know some biology, to understand and start to answer the questions that I had in research,” explains Burket.
Each study compliments and builds off of the previous one, with all of her published works reflecting her overall goal of exploring novel drug strategies in neurodevelopmental disorders.
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Today, Burket – an assistant professor at Christopher Newport University in Virginia – teaches a variety of courses, such as an introductory course in molecular biology, a neurobiology course and a neuroscience senior seminar course.
One day, after teaching her neurobiology class, Burket takes a moment to talk one of her students through a difficult concept. She stands excitedly in front of the whiteboard, making sure that the student is following along with her explanation.
Her teaching methods involve making connections to her students’ areas of interest so that they can see, firsthand, the relevancy of what they’re learning.
“When we’re in that learning environment, if it’s something we care about, or we can relate to, we will understand it better,” she says.
When asked what she enjoys the most about teaching, Burket emphasized the importance of being able to break down complex scientific information in a digestible manner for her students.
“You could have the best data in the world. But if you can’t explain it in a way that people understand. What does it matter?,” she says.
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Burket’s small office, tucked away on the first floor of Forbes Hall, has all the earmarkings of a scientist busy at work. In one corner, a crisp white lab coat hangs from a cluttered coat rack. On her desk, two bright computer screens display photos of the frontal cortex from her latest research study that she has been working on since last spring.
Burket was one of 18 recipients in Europe and the U.S. who received a grant to conduct a study on a mouse with a micro-deletion in one of its chromosomes – a deletion that has been associated with psychotic symptoms.
Burket and her team want to know if a particular protein in the brain that is reduced for people who have schizophrenia or autism spectrum disorder is also diminished in the mouse with a chromosome deletion.
So far, they have conducted behavior testing on the mice to assess certain motor skills that are typically affected by these disorders. The research is ongoing and her and her team are currently analyzing their data.
“There’s so many experiments that you could do everything right, you followed the protocol correctly, and it still doesn’t work out,” says Burket, who noted that failure is a part of the process. “So I think when you have a positive finding, or you have something that is worth publishing, it’s unexpected but also fantastic.”
Burket hopes that the results of her latest study will reveal whether or not there is a correlation between that specific chromosome deletion and neurodevelopmental disorders. With such a discovery, Burket could expand on a relatively unexplored path within the field of novel medication strategies.
