Rebecca Johnston joins the NeuroEvoDevo Lab at FHL
By Jim Truman
We are very pleased to welcome Rebecca Johnston to the scientific community at FHL, where she has joined our project on Arthropod NeuroEvoDevo in Lab 10. I first met Rebecca about six years ago when she joined the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in Northern Virginia as a Research Specialist for the FlyLight Project, a large project focused on the neuroanatomy of the Drosophila (fruit fly) central nervous system. It employed a small “army” of technicians who were responsible for micro-dissection, immunohistochemistry and confocal microscopy of nervous systems from tens of thousands of Drosophila strains. Rebecca was engaged in the challenge of efficiently rolling out large-scale data sets and was involved in the training, protocol optimization, and documentation of the project. However, eventually there was pressure to move her from the science side of the project to the managerial side. When I mentioned to her that I was moving back to the Pacific Northwest and had an opening if she were interested, I was delighted when she told me that she was.
Rebecca has always had a love of nature and the outdoors and an insatiable curiosity of the world around her and how it works. As a young child she had a reputation for being captivated by watching and wondering how animals move with such ease. This fascination was reinforced in college when she discovered the field of Neuroethology, and led her to the graduate program at the University of Colorado at Boulder. There, she did her PhD studies with Anne Bekoff on the development of motor patterns in chicks and how their nervous system utilized a particular motor unit in diverse motor outputs. Rebecca's interest in understanding the neural mechanisms underlying behavior then led her to invertebrates, which have simplified, accessible nervous systems. She worked at the University of Arizona with Rick Levine, one of my former postdocs, on a project using the larvae of the tobacco hornworm to examine the central pattern generating circuits that underlie locomotion, and how hormones modify these circuits during metamorphosis. Her increased appreciation of other invertebrate systems and her first link to marine stations came through three successive summers as the teaching assistant for the Neural Systems of Behavior course at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) in Woods Hole. Further ties to Woods Hole came with a summer fellowship of independent research at MBL as a Grass Fellow.
Rebecca’s interest in undergraduate teaching solidified while she was the Clare Boothe Luce Assistant Professor of Neurobiology in Colby College in Maine. She later moved to southern Oregon where she taught pre-health professional and nursing students in a rural community college. This allowed her to pursue a long-standing interest in helping non-traditional students enter a professional career that allows them to earn a livable wage without leaving their local community.
Now at FHL, Rebecca is drawing on her considerable experience with invertebrate nervous systems and behavior analyses as we explore how arthropod nervous systems have adapted to the diverse systems of locomotion shown by crustaceans and their insect descendants.
