Dr. Drew Schreiner is an F32 award recipient who used the funding opportunity to study the neuronal mechanisms that influence songbird learning behavior. The F32 funding opportunity supports the research training of promising postdoctoral fellows early in their postdoctoral training period.
The NIH BRAIN Initiative funding portfolio enables the collaborative and multidisciplinary research necessary to help us understand the brain’s complexities. Dr. Drew Schreiner received a BRAIN Initiative F32 Individual Postdoctoral Fellowship award to support his research on understanding motor variability in the basal ganglia that control song learning behavior from songbirds. The F32 program rewards promising postdoctorates early in their careers by enhancing their research training in project areas that advance the goals of the NIH BRAIN Initiative. This article is part of a series that highlights the careers of NIH BRAIN Initiative F32 grantees.
While the BRAIN F32 funding opportunity is not currently available due to this fiscal year’s (FY24) budget constraints, we encourage applicants to follow and search the NIH Guide to find funding opportunities that best fit their proposed projects. Parent announcement mechanisms, like the parent F32, for example, may be good options.
Check out the interview below to learn more about Dr. Schreiner’s post-doc research. He discusses how he became interested in research, what he hopes to achieve next, and the advice he’d give to other early-stage career researchers.
Would you please briefly introduce yourself, your research interests, and your academic background?
My name is Drew Schreiner (he/his), and I’m currently a postdoc with Dr. Richard Mooney at Duke University studying the neurobiology of birdsong learning. I completed a double major in molecular biology and neuroscience at the University of Colorado Boulder and earned my PhD from the University of California, San Diego.
I am interested in understanding how we use prior experience to guide our behavior. During my PhD work with Dr. Christina Gremel, I found that cortico-basal ganglia circuits and the behaviors they controlled were influenced by a wealth of experiential variables that needed further investigation. Ultimately, this work convinced me of the utility of studying self-generated, complex motor skills, leading me to seek a postdoc with Dr. Mooney to study birdsong learning, a natural, sequential motor skill controlled by well-defined cortico-basal ganglia circuitry.
Currently, I am working to identify how different premotor “cortical” inputs into the basal ganglia contribute to song learning and have isolated one premotor-basal ganglia synapse that is necessary to drive recently learned changes to song. Through a collaboration with Dr. Josh Huang (Duke University), I am also developing a novel RNA-based viral vector toolkit to achieve cell-type specific access to the songbird basal ganglia. This represents a big step forward, as the lack of transgenic birds has historically presented a huge hurdle to understanding the cellular and synaptic mechanisms controlling song learning.
What led you to research? What continues to drive your ambitions as a scientist?
What first got me into science was a love of nature and particularly animal behavior. I was fascinated by trying to understand why animals behaved certain ways. Early on in my career, this interest led me to study disordered decision-making (decision-making styles that may be abnormal or impaired, such as indecisiveness and impulsive behavior), particularly in substance use disorders. Over time, I became more and more interested in returning to my initial interest in investigating complex, naturalistic behaviors.
What major unanswered questions do you hope to address in your research?
I hope to understand how we learn to perform, complex natural skills akin to musical or athletic performance. While we have made great strides towards understanding some of the behavioral and neural mechanisms controlling relatively simple types of associative or operant learning, we know comparatively little about how we learn and perform some of our most impressive skills. For example, how does a violinist learn to play a concerto? These types of motor skills are often learned without obvious external reinforcement and are extremely complex and high-dimensional (e.g., notes comprising a song may vary in their amplitude, pitch, duration, timing, etc.).
Birdsong learning is a remarkable model system for understanding this type of learning. Juvenile songbirds will first memorize a tutor’s song and then, through intensive practice, will eventually transform an immature practice song into a song that closely resembles that of their tutor, all without any external reinforcement. I am fascinated by trying to understand how such multidimensional, internally motivated learning progresses. Moreover, birds possess song-specialized neural circuitry, including neural circuits necessary only for learning to sing. Compared to the mammalian striatum, which receives highly convergent cortical and thalamic input, the song-specialized portion of the bird striatum receives input from just two premotor “cortical” inputs. This greatly simplifies the search for the synaptic loci that enable complex skill learning. I am excited by my current and future work aimed at isolating the cellular and synaptic mechanisms that drive song learning.
What are some of the challenges you have encountered in your research and/or career? How have you or how are you working to overcome them?
I think I have been quite lucky in my career, though I have encountered my fair share of challenges. Like many others, I dealt with the COVID-19 pandemic at the end of my graduate career and the start of my postdoc. I already struggled with achieving a good work-life balance; the pandemic made this even more of a challenge as the line between work and home became completely blurred and stoppages in onsite work made me feel as though I was lagging behind. Returning to a normal routine has been tremendously helpful in dealing with this and building appropriate dividing lines between work and home. As for other challenges, I always try to appreciate what a privilege it is to get to go to work, learn new things, and interact with brilliant colleagues.
What would be the next step in your research (or professional development)?
My next step is applying for transition awards like the K99/R00. Aside from the obvious concrete benefit of these awards, I am also looking forward to getting a chance to dedicate significant time to think deeply about the work I want to pursue as an independent investigator.
What would be your advice to others who may want to apply to the parent F32 program?
First the generic advice: 1) Apply! And 2) Start writing early! Since the F32 is targeted towards early postdocs, I started writing it pretty much immediately on joining the lab, and submitted it just a few months in. I would also encourage applicants to think about how their proposal aligns with BRAIN Initiative goals, or the missions of the participating NIH Institutes and Centers of the parent F32. In my case, I assembled a team of co-sponsors: Drs. Richard Mooney, Josh Huang, and John Pearson to bridge expertise in behavioral, systems, and computational neuroscience. The BRAIN Initiative is quite keen on this sort of collaborative, interdisciplinary approach – so try to think outside the box and build bridges with other potential sponsors.
Are there any specific relevant training and professional development opportunities that you find useful during the fellowship?
The BRAIN Initiative Conference has been a valuable opportunity to present, get critical feedback, and professionally network with scientists and NIH staff. The BRAIN Initiative’s focus on tool development made the meeting even more useful for me; after the meeting I reached out to several groups to get their thoughts on how I might apply their tools to address my research interests.
Fill in the blank: When I’m not working on a research project, I am…
Walking in the woods with my hound dog Henry.
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