- With two little girls to tend in addition to their academic careers, Jim Chambers and Bekki Spencer have their hands, plates, and refrigerator full.
Bekki Spenceris a new professor in the Department of Psychology recruited fresh from a prestigious neuroscience post-doc at UC Berkeley. Spencer, 34, is incredibly smart, good natured, and funny. She also—sickeningly, maddeningly—is the kind of woman who despite a full schedule of teaching, and researching how human brains sleep and learn, somehow finds time to make handmade cards and bake cupcakes from scratch. In addition to mentoring a team of grads and undergrads, she raises two feisty girls, ages 1 and 3. Did I mention she runs marathons?
Her husband,Jim Chambers, 34, is similarly gifted at multitasking. Chambers Lab is a set of doorways on the sixth floor of Lederle Research Tower, each leading down a data-strewn rabbit hole. In one, neuroscience graduate studentRosie Combs-Bachmannis polishing a micro-pipette, a fine glass tube that she’ll attempt to clamp onto a cell. In the main lab, grad studentNate Akeyevaporates the solvent ethyl acetate to isolate glutamate analogs and mixes compounds in the fume hood. In Chambers’ office, books and whiteboards vie for space with baby bouncers and teething rings. His window provides a slice of the campus looking south, in the rough direction of his Long Island boyhood home.
Chambers glides his six-foot-four frame among these spaces, offering quiet guidance and instructional give-and-take. Here are the portals and ingredients for what he researches: how to enhance or erase memory at the cellular level; this knowledge can help us understand, from a molecular perspective, how memories are formed and how we learn.
As he walks and talks, Chambers occasionally reverts to his preferred vernacular of lines and dots and arrows, reaching for a marker to diagram cells and reactions as he attempts to explain (to someone, in my case, who took high school chemistry twice), what it is he does, what it is that attracts hundreds of thousands in research dollars, and what makes grad students’ eyes twinkle like they are great explorers á la Lewis and Clark, their discoveries measured in ions instead of acres.
Spencer and Chambers were recruited together, part of UMass Amherst’s strategy to hire and retain young faculty. The premise goes like this: Find couples who want to raise families while also pursuing their burgeoning academic careers. If you can support their efforts to nurture happy families and lead pioneering research, longevity will translate into increased influence and contributions to the campus, important dividends paid out over time. It’s the human resources take on “life science.”
The Office of Faculty Development has the campus’s major responsibility to help faculty with work-life balance and other issues that affect their advancement. Under Mellon Grant funding that promotes mentor networks for new and underrepresented faculty, a group is studying steps to increase family-friendly policies on campus.
The “two-body” problem, as it’s called, is most challenging in the STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) where the goal is often to bolster female ranks. “That’s because many female scientists are married to fellow scientists, but the same is not as true for men,” says Barbara Pearson, academic liaison in Research Liaison and Development, In other words, if the campus recruits a female scientist the odds are her husband is a science professor as well. There are almost a dozen new faculty couple hires in recent years, and all, says Pearson, “cite spousal accommodation as the central reason for coming to UMass Amherst.” Pearson runs peer-mentoring for STEM deans and this year added a program focused on new parents.
When a family such as the Spencer-Chambers becomes woven into the community, it follows that they are more inclined to stay through bumps in the road. The town of Amherst’s reputation helps in this effort; it is a well-regarded community, especially in which to raise kids, with its public schools consistently rated among the top in the Bay State. It offers interesting housing stock that retains value; the Spencer-Chambers bought a Cape in the high $300Ks on a street originally settled by faculty 50 years ago. Residents are attracted by the same amenities: a short walk to schools, campus, and downtown; nearby conservation land; and neighbors with similar investments in the community and the campus. Four generations return to their old neighborhood—Jim and Bekki’s new neighborhood—for a block party every Labor Day weekend, as they have for more than 30 years. There’s a sense of place and history here. It’s good chemistry for young families far from their own hometowns.
UMass Amherst’s reputation for bringing in generous research funding is another key part of the package for family recruits; the campus is solidly in the top echelons of attracting funding; last year, the campus secured over $135 million in sponsored research awards, both from public and private funding agencies.
Research dollars pay for grad students like Combs-Bachmann to spend her days patch-clamping; Chambers says it can be three weeks of 10-hour days to produce just one strike. But when it happens, she can dab the cell with glutamate and collect tons of data to see if their new drugs work. Explains Chambers, it’s the most tedious of jobs, but when you get a good patch, “you might end up collecting 95 percent of your data in one day.” And it’s so worth it: a 10-minute look into the life of a cell is a rocket ship to another universe. When that rocket takes off, Chambers can begin to find answers to his big questions about how memory might be enhanced at the cellular level, perhaps creating a new class of drugs to make our memories brighter, longer, faster—or completely nonexistent. “After consciousness,” says Chambers, “I believe our memories make us who we are.”
Part of Chambers Lab funding comes from a Young Investigators Grant from the Human Frontiers Science Program, which targets teams of scientists from different countries who combine their expertise to approach questions that cannot be answered by individual laboratories.
In his work on glutamate channels, Chambers developed something that can help all molecular scientists: photolabels. He found a way to put a certain light-sensitive compound on an ion channel he was studying, to indicate in brilliant green when it’s activated.
“If we can tap into the glutamate channel, and over-express it, and see what happens...” Chambers’ voice—and his dry-erase marker—trail off pondering the possibilities.
When Jim Chambers was eight years old, he got a chemistry set for Christmas. His mother, a former nun, says with a gleam in her eye that she was blessed with a perfect child. “Except for the chemistry set. There are still splatter marks on my basement ceiling from his botched experiments,” she chides. “And now his hobby is his job.”
Chambers talks with such reverence about the fabled “toy” it seems mythical. “It was like nothing that could ever be sold today,” he says. It had toxic substances and he often created explosive reactions or stunk up the house with steaming sulfuric compounds. With every ceiling spatter, he became more hooked on performing powerful alchemy. His mother was truly thankful he hadn’t burned the house down by the time he packed off for SUNY Buffalo to be a mechanical engineer. The way he remembers it, when signing up for his classes, he turned one page too far in the course guide and became rapt by a description of a medicinal chemistry course. He switched his major to the School of Pharmacy post-haste.
Dr. Sleep met Dr. Memory in graduate school at Purdue University. She was studying neuroscience, he medicinal chemistry. Both had recently ended serious relationships in the transition to a new phase in their academic careers. How they met: “It was kind of a set up,” admits Spencer. “I shared an apartment with a woman in his department. She hosted a Super Bowl party, and he was invited. Later, we got asked out by mutual friends, who intentionally didn’t show.” Before meeting Chambers, Spencer had filled the void with a dog, Zazu, named for the Lion King character. “Zazu is the first brain we shared!” she says, seeming to realize it as she speaks. With another dog, a cat, two daughters, a fish, and now a grad student added to the mix (the aforementioned Combs-Bachmann who is doing rotation projects with both of them), the brains they share continue to multiply.
Spencer was pregnant with Finnley when they came to UMass Amherst last January. To accommodate the pressing needs of a working family that would soon have a newborn in addition to toddler Noa, Spencer’s maternity leave was followed by a semester of paternity leave for Chambers. He worked, but he wasn’t required to teach. Even on the days he brought Finn to his office to crawl around and check out the cabinets of high-tech electrophysiology systems, he was able to get his lab outfitted and operating, bring on grad students, fulfill the requirements of his various grants, and on nights and weekends, finish off their basement as a playroom for the girls in their new (old) house. This past spring, the Spencer-Chambers hosted nine academic couples (and their babies and toddlers) in their basement as part of the new parents peer-mentoring STEM program supported by the campus.
Approaching the end of grad school at Purdue, Chambers and Spencer wed, and moved to Berkeley for matching post-docs. After five years in the Bay Area, they were courted by UC Irvine (the only finalist where they were both negotiating), but decided on UMass Amherst.
UC Irvine was not prepared to accommodate the spousal appointment, Spencer recalls. They were slow whereas UMass Amherst was able to quickly come up with very competitive packages for both of them; lab support and competitive pre-tenure salaries in the $70Ks.
“Most of all,” says Spencer, a native Midwesterner, “UC Irvine is in Orange County and at the time I was watching Real Housewives of Orange County —my vice for letting my overworked brain go to mush for that last hour of the day. Let’s just say I couldn’t picture Noa carrying around $500 handbags and driving a Hummer,” Spencer jokes.
There’s a kernel of truth at the heart of Bekki’s playful exaggeration: Many Irvine faculty live in a university-owned neighborhood—they buy the house but the university owns the land. “The neighborhood was homogenous, overpriced, and not very interesting,” says Spencer. “The family-friendliness was night and day compared with Amherst.”
Bekki Spencer is eminently likable in spite of her overachieving, because, on any given day—which might include co-teaching a dreaded 8 a.m. class, a committee luncheon, preparing a conference paper, scheduling brain scans at Cooley Dickinson Hospital, and 8 p.m. baths and bed times—she is the overworked anchor of a family that juggles babysitters, town fairs, faculty dinners, and mentoring moments with grace and openness. She is the de facto choreographer of an improv dance number that never has a finale. Like any working mom, she rides highs and lows, from first steps and first words to being called on her way into the office to retrieve the feverish baby she just dropped off at daycare. On top of that, she must teach, conduct research, and publish in order to hopefully earn tenure in 2012.
One reason why faculty couples receive extra benefits is that in coming to UMass Amherst they are leaving behind their natural support networks. This can add stress in several ways; with no kin nearby, Spencer and Chambers rely on paid caregivers to help with the girls; they will both attend campus daycare and preschool before enrolling in Amherst schools. To keep close ties, extended family and old friends visit often, so there’s the added work of hosting frequent houseguests, as welcome and helpful as they may be.
Given these contingencies, Bekki’s calendar can look as wildly incomprehensible as a brain scan of the cerebellum.
This section at the back of the head, packed with twice as many neurons as the rest, is what Bekki Spencer explores. She is fascinated by its implication in the fine line between cognition and action. “Like when you learn to play the piano with your fingers and simultaneously make sense of the musical notes on the sheet music. Truly being skilled means integrating these dimensions seamlessly,” she explains. She’s also a ranking expert on how sleep benefits this learning. To further her understanding in these areas, she and her troupe use windows into the brains of their subjects.
When Cooley Dickenson’s MRI facility is available for research on Saturdays, Bekki invites subjects to slide into the tube and wiggle their fingers and toes while she maps out the body surface in the cerebellum. The 1.5 Tesla magnet provides high-resolution pictures of the inside of the brain but also detects the differences in brain activity between moving your own finger and having someone else move your finger.
Meanwhile Combs-Bachmann spends the evening in a subject’s home attaching electrodes to a person’s head and chin, bidding them goodnight, then reading their polysomnograms back at the lab. The records, six and sometimes up to 10 hours of waves and ripples the brain produces during sleep, are transformed into simple histograms of the sleep stages the subject experienced.
“At night, while the rest of your body shuts down,” Spencer says, “your brain works overtime.” In the realm of motor learning, the brain effectively replays an all-night loop of learned patterns of movement—a subconscious, automatic memorization machine. “Young brains, like Finnley’s, need more sleep because they are processing so much information as they learn about the world.”
When you sleep, you phase through different cycles. Stage two of non-REM, or NREM-2, sleep seems to correlate with sequence learning, such as playing the piano. It’s also the only stage of sleep where researchers have recorded spindles, what Spencer calls “superfast brain bursts of activity,” which she and others believe reflect brain plasticity.
Because so many of us crave a good night’s sleep, Spencer’s research into this area garners considerable support and interest, including a prestigious career transition award from the National Institute on Aging for research on how age affects the benefit of sleep on our memory.
“As we age, this benefit of sleep seems to vanish,” says Spencer. “This might be a very novel way to explain the memory problems older adults experience.”
Sleep patterns overall vary significantly with age. In older adults, studies show the quality of NREM-2 stage two sleep is in decline. “These latest studies make me think that the pattern is what’s important. The quality not the quantity.” It could be one reason why sleep aids, even natural ones like Saint John’s wort, aren’t good long-term solutions. Spencer says they can cause a change in the way our brains sample sleep stages. So while your physical body may rest and restore, because an aid changes the way you sleep, your brain might not benefit so much.
“Instead of pulling an all-nighter, students should get some sleep,” she advises. Likewise, for all you aging Einsteins: The corollary is that when you’re over 40, go ahead and nap if you’re tired, but not because it is going to make you smarter.
So, do Spencer and family get enough quality sleep? And the million-dollar question for parents everywhere: Are her kids good sleepers, and if so, why? “They are,” she says; her “method” is letting them cry sometimes so they can learn to put themselves to sleep; she calls taking care of sleep habits one’s “sleep hygiene.” And even she admits she sometimes feels the crunch of working motherhood in terms of her own sleep; on a good week, she averages seven hours a night, but believes she’s at her best with consistent eights. “I ask myself, ‘what did we do with our time before?” she says, then remembers: “Before we had kids, Jim and I used to go backpacking in the Sierras every other weekend. I always sleep better in the fresh air.”
Now the couple’s common ground is less mountainous, but not molehill-y. While Chambers studies the cellular mechanisms of memory, Spencer looks at the behavioral aspects. Having Combs-Bachmann in rotation with both of them helped build connections to each other’s work, but says Spencer, “we always say, there needs to be one more person in between us, someone perhaps studying animal behavior so that we can learn and manipulate both the big-picture process as well as the process at the molecular level.”
Combs-Bachmann sees herself building on her married mentors’ research in some way; for now, she is immersed in learning science, first-hand, and the finer points of achieving work-life balance. “It’s encouraging to see they have a family life as well as managing the 24/7 life of academia,” says Combs-Bachmann. “It’s good to have a model for that.”
For the Spencer-Chambers, balancing home and work is life sciences writ in big block letters on the fridge. They spend their days studying memory and sleep. When they go home, they use their remaining energy to create memories for themselves and their daughters.
And then they try to get a decent night’s sleep.
