Dr. Jaeger is a lecturer in the Emory NBB and Biology Departments and the Jaeger Lab founder, which focuses on computational neuroscience research.
We had a chance to chat with him over Zoom about his professional journey.
Please introduce yourself
My name is Dieter Jaeger. I am a biology professor at the Emory College of Arts and Sciences. I am trained in neuroscience as a Ph.D. student, and honestly, I never obtained my bachelor's degree, but that's a funny story on its own. I got my undergraduate degree in Germany in the early '80s when Germany did not have bachelor's degrees. We studied for a few years and then started the master's program and did not get a degree between the bachelor's and masters. It is a very different system than in America. Before I went on to the master's level, I came to the United States to study neuroscience through a Ph.D. level because these types of programs did not exist in Germany at that time. I wanted to be a researcher in neuroscience and figure out how the brain makes us think, see, and act. I was very curious. I learned to be a neurophysiologist and computation neuroscientist for over six years in my Ph.D. program. Afterward, I had the typical academic career with a postdoctoral fellowship for another six years and then starting as an assistant professor at Emory in 1997
Were you always interested in pursuing research in neuroscience, or was this a topic of interest that came later in your academic career?
It started in the middle of my college years. I came into college as a biochemist and believed that biochemistry, genes, and molecules were at the frontline and revealed the mysteries of life. And it does in many ways. Advances in molecular research are amazing and still coming at a fast pace as the genomes are sequenced. We can do a more design-based understanding of proteins ad proteomics plus gene regulation comes up. Even in the seventies, we knew that these questions are important, so seeing this tremendous progress in biochemistry is incredible.
Nonetheless, I found it more interesting to think about who we
are as a person. I went for the thing I was most curious about. Since my second
year of college, I knew I wanted to be a neuroscience professor, and in that
sense, I was an early decider, and it worked out.
Yes, I had a variety and a whole sequence of mentors that meant a lot to who I am and how I think. My first mentor was my advisor for my undergraduate neuroscience research project that I completed in my third year at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. I studied with a professor named Valentino Braitenberg, who was the director of Biological Cybernetics. He studied the cerebellum and cortex neurons were connected while discovering what the anatomy implies functionally. In those years, people thought they could jump from understanding anatomy to understanding function. Now, we know that we need to do a lot of experiments in physiology and actual activity recordings before we can know function. He was a very inspiring person who loved to engage in discussion and was curious and helpful, and willing to put in resources for students to try something out. He was an amazing guy and the founding father of my line of mentors and made me intellectually the most the way I am now. In terms of methods and skills, each of my mentors brought in input and helped me train in computer programming and understanding behavior and modeling. Each mentor helped me gain a different skill set that I now carry with me like a tool kit to this day.
What challenges did you face in your career or the path towards your career? How did you overcome them?
To some degree, there were financial challenges. I fell in between the cracks of the American funding model for Ph.D. students and had to fend for myself for my income. I TA'd and got a fellowship and living relatively frugally in a cooperative house with other students. Eating rice and beans is rather cheap compared to going out to restaurants … or the Emory meal plan, for that matter.
What excites you the most about your career?
I am most excited that we have progressed in our understanding of the brain. It is not progress that one can achieve by themselves in the lab but rather due to many researchers. It took many scientists to be a part of this worldwide community of people who want to figure out how the brain works in workshops, meetings, and training functions while chatting with other researchers. This community inspires me the most. I often get inspired by new methods and seeing how we can do something right now that we couldn't three years ago and how every year a new method gets developed. Right now, I am very excited about the NIH-founded Brain Initiative, by which money from Congress allows us to study the brain in more sophisticated ways. Many engineers have entered the research field of neurotechnology to develop better tools that will enable us to record and image the brain. It is like being a kid in a sugar store in which, every year, new techniques pop up that allow us to do what we couldn't before.
Even in my human physiology class, I discuss DREADDs (designer receptors exclusively activated by designer drugs). Many of these techniques are a marriage of new physiology and engineering tools. There is knowledge of all levels coming together.
How does your role as a professor compare and contrast to your role as a researcher and PI?
As a professor, I am also a teacher, which is strange in a traditional research career. Teaching is learned on the job, and I have been a teaching apprentice ever since I was a TA in a biology class during graduate school and mentored students as a post-doc. The first class I officially taught was as an assistant professor, and a senior colleague helped me. Teaching is something I had to learn through experience and mentors. In a sense, science teaching is done by scientists and not by professional teachers. However, Emory gives us special courses, and there are efforts to make us better teachers as we go along.
What is one thing you wish you knew five years ago? What about forty years ago?
Five years ago, I wish I knew about COVID. Forty years ago, I wish I knew that much of my work is quantitative and based on physics. Maybe I would have done more physics and math in my undergrad years, along with less biology. Physics for my line of work in computational neuroscience is an important area and goes into data analysis and statistics. I am very grateful we have a QSS major and the QTM requirement. Everything you do nowadays requires a critical analysis of data, which cannot be done without computers. I am glad I jumped onto computers early on, but I wish I jumped on the more sophisticated data analysis methods earlier. There is nothing like a math class with homework and long hours to learn math on the side.
What is the best advice you would give to someone pursuing the same track as you?
What is an interesting fact that you want students to know about you?
One fact that I want students to know about me is that my hobby, which balances my lifestyle, is soaring. That is taking a glider into the air, which brings yet another set of challenges that rely on computer interfaces, data analysis, weather prediction, and reading clouds correctly. Otherwise, you are right back on the ground and not where you started. So, it is an exciting hobby and includes teamwork. It allows for balance, so I am not sitting at the computer all day long.