Thanks to dissertation research by Alyssa Meejong O'Farrell, neurosurgeons may someday be able to cut away sections of the brain, with total confidence that these areas are not involved in language or other essential human functions. In fact, Alyssa herself may be one of those neurosurgeons.

As the PhD part of the Medical Scientist Training Program, Alyssa is studying blood flow in animal brains suffering seizure or migraine headaches. Researchers have already established that if a normal person is doing a language task, "there's more blood flow to the language area of the brain . . . you can see the language area of the brain light up," she explains.

This knowledge is already being used in surgical procedures. Brain maps made with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) help surgeons avoid important functional areas of the brain. In the most advanced studies, patients actually do simple language tasks during the operation itself, and the measurements of blood flow are taken after the brain resettles following skull removal. Alyssa has participated in this type of operation as part of her work in the Brain Mapping Division of the Department of Neurology.

However, an important piece of information is still missing. Researchers "don't really understand why blood flow increases to the brain when areas are active," Alyssa says. "They have some ideas, but it hasn't been studied well in pathological states," for example, among patients with seizures, tumors, or neurological trauma. It's important "to understand if the blood flow response is still normal after trauma," Alyssa explains, otherwise language areas might not experience increased blood flow during imaging, and thus remain unidentified for surgeons. It's this gap in the research that Alyssa hopes to help fill with her work creating images of rodent brains during and after migraine or seizure.

Alyssa started her Medical Scientist Training program with two years in medical school at the University of Pennsylvania. Moving to UCLA with her boyfriend, she took up the PhD part of the training. Being at UCLA has had an important bonus: Alyssa has been able to study Korean, the native language of her mother, who came to the United States to attend graduate school, married, and stayed. "It's nice having a so much available here," Alyssa says, explaining that she's also taken courses in French and Spanish "just for fun."

When Alyssa finishes her PhD in about a year she'll go back to medical school, probably in neurosurgery. The program, funded by the National Institutes of Health at a number of medical schools, is aimed at creating scientists with the clinical expertise of doctors.

As a physics major at Harvard University, Alyssa saw graduates turning to finance or other unrelated fields when they couldn't find work in physics. She began to look around for other options, and the pleasure she'd taken in a summer job at a physiology lab steered her in the direction of the Medical Scientist program.

Neuroscience was attractive because it includes logical and mathematical components, exposing her to "a lot of problems that may not explain the universe, but the results are useful." Computer modeling and ever-improving techniques for imaging the brain's activity open interesting doors. For example, Alyssa says, "we are able to figure out how simple cell behavior can lead to more complicated things like a breathing pattern or a heart beat or even perceptual abilities like detecting the edges of objects and recognizing shapes."

Several years of study are ahead for her, but eventually, Alyssa hopes to teach at a medical school or research university. As a role model, she has her mentor, Arthur Toga, co-founder of the International Consortium for Brain Mapping, which has just received a second $5.5 million grant from the NIH. The consortium's goal is to develop a comprehensive atlas of the organization and function of the brain.

"Choosing a mentor was very important to me." Alyssa says. She feels that Dr. Toga "is in some ways as much a businessman as he is a scientist" and that pragmatism about outcomes makes it "easy to relate to him." Alyssa wanted "to be sure that I wrote papers while I was here, that I gave talks," she says. "He expects you to write a grant or be involved in writing a grant while you're here."

In Alyssa's case, Dr. Toga's expectations have been met. She can do everything, he says, from researching the literature to writing the paper. "She just pounds away at a problem," Dr. Toga says. "What she's doing is very important."

Published in Fall 1999, Graduate Quarterly