In the heady, complex and intense world of neuroscience, Dr. Steve Ramirez thrives on having a research team that finds genuine enjoyment in working together.
For Ramirez, the brain is uncharted territory.
“It’s that pure excitement of feeling like you’re a scavenger trying to figure out how this thing works,” says Ramirez, whose research aims to redefine how the world understands neurological functions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and dementia.
He is exhilarated about taking on the challenge of exploring how billions of brain cells communicate with each other. Ramirez describes today’s science as a “blossoming era” where ways of listening to the brain and modulating its activity are experiencing breakthroughs.
In the lab, he and his team will explore the novel circuitries that exist in the brain and try to figure out what happens when they break down. One of his goals is to find novel ways of intervening with the brain, ideally noninvasively, and resetting an abnormal brain back to baseline.
As an undergraduate researcher in the lab of Dr. Howard Eichenbaum at Boston University (BU), Ramirez explored ideas and got a sense of what a research scientist does. In graduate school, Dr. Susumu Tonegawa at MIT showed him what it actually means to work as a team and be fearless in asking the questions.
“That’s where I really fell in love with neuroscience, when I saw what it meant to do it with other likeminded people,” says Ramirez.
