By: Jazmine Robinson
For this installment of “Faces of Innovation,” we sat down with Ashlyn Anderson, a PhD student training in the Cochran lab at HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. Like several other HudsonAlpha trainees, Ashlyn’s journey with HudsonAlpha began during high school when her class took a campus tour. Now, Ashlyn is a computational biologist deeply engaged in researching brain diseases, driven by a desire to build foundational knowledge and apply basic science to critical health challenges. Keep reading to learn about Ashlyn’s academic background, pivotal experiences that led her to research, and the curiosity that fuels her impactful research.
Jazmine Robinson: Can you briefly describe your role and research focus here at the Institute?
Ashlyn Anderson: I’m a PhD student in the graduate biomedical science program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in the genetics, genomics, and bioinformatics theme. I am doing my graduate research in the Cochran lab at HudsonAlpha. I officially joined the Cochran lab in January, but I’ve been at HudsonAlpha since August of 2020, primarily as a computational biologist. My research focuses on how gene regulatory elements in the brain are conserved or diverged across species. We’re interested in how changes to these regulatory elements may have contributed to human brain evolution and how they can influence risk for psychiatric and neurodegenerative diseases.
Jazmine: What led you to be interested in this kind of work?
Ashlyn: For the past five years, I’ve been working extensively on diseases of the brain, primarily Alzheimer’s disease, and asking very targeted questions about how things are impacted in disease. Starting my PhD gave me the opportunity to shift towards more basic research, which has always been a deep interest of mine. I’m drawn to this work because understanding how regulatory elements are conserved allows us to ask new and broader questions about what makes the human brain unique and how changes in these elements contribute to disease. Also, I’m especially interested in the intersection of basic science and its application to improving our knowledge of disease.
Jazmine: Can you share your academic background and how it led you to this current position?
Ashlyn: I have a bachelor’s in biology and math from the University of Alabama and a master’s in biostatistics from the University of Florida. I was working on my master’s during COVID, and I had previously participated in BioTrain in both the Cooper and Barsh labs. I reached out to my contacts from my internships to see if there were any opportunities, and was able to join the Myers lab as a computational biologist.
Jazmine: What initially motivated you to pursue a career in science and research?
Ashlyn: I’ve always been curious about how things work, and it’s really cool to work in a field where you are asking questions that aren’t answered yet. It’s a field that’s rapidly moving, so I’m always challenged. I also like the idea that my work is contributing to making the world better, improving our knowledge of medicine and disease. So it’s twofold: science satisfies my curiosity, and I get to feel like I’m doing my part to make the world a little bit better.
Jazmine: I love this, Ashlyn. What would you say are some of the most valuable lessons or skills that you’ve gained through your research experiences so far?
Ashlyn: I think one of the most valuable skills that I’ve learned is to ask meaningful questions and to think about science in a questioning way. When I first started out in science, my approach was ‘what’s my task list today?’ As I’ve gained experience, I have had great mentors, and I’m starting to think more about how to frame scientific questions, design experiments to answer them, and connect the results back to both basic biology and disease.
Jazmine: Speaking of mentors, can you share what mentors or colleagues have played a significant role in your career?
Ashlyn: Oh, so many. Greg Cooper and Greg Barsh were both early mentors for me. Working with them over the course of two summers of BioTrain initially convinced me to stay in science. Spending four years in the Myers Lab was great, too. Rick gave me opportunities to figure out where I saw myself in the research space, whether I wanted to stay strictly a staff scientist, if I wanted to be leading my own projects, or eventually have my own lab one day. He helped me find opportunities to answer those questions. My first project in the Myers lab was part of a collaboration led by Nick Cochran, and since then, he has been a great mentor. Over the past five years, he’s played a pivotal role in my development as a scientist, and he’s been instrumental in giving me the opportunities to discover my interests and the support to take on new challenges.
Jazmine: You’re currently a PhD student. What are your long-term career goals?
Ashlyn: I am still figuring it out to some extent. I’m really interested in diseases of the brain, whether that’s neurodegenerative or rare developmental diseases. There’s a lot of interesting work being done in all of those.
Jazmine: Outside of research, what else do you like to do?
Ashlyn: I hike a lot and like to travel. I’ve taken some really cool trips in the last couple of years. One was a backpacking trip in Iceland, where you take an off-roading bus to the middle of the island, they drop you off, and you navigate back to the coast. I was with my younger brother, and it took us about 3 days of hiking.
I like unique experiences. In my senior year of college, I went on a medical mission trip to eastern Peru, where they just dropped us off in the middle of the Amazon. Because of its location across the mountain, it’s cut off from the rest of Peru, and they don’t have a lot of access to medical supplies. That was a really cool experience, because not only were we working in the city, but we would take a seaplane and go to the smaller villages to deliver medical supplies. The Peru trip was also a deciding point for me because it confirmed for me that I didn’t want to go to medical school and led me to consider research.
Jazmine: What advice would you give to other students or individuals who aren’t sure of their career path?
Ashlyn: I would advise them to get experience when and where they can. It’s important to try different things, even when you think that you’re sure about where you want to go. I am here today because I tried out a bunch of different paths and asked for experiences in a bunch of different areas. It has truly helped me define what I’m interested in and know what my research interests are. There are little hints of all of my experiences in the work that I do now.
