Elizabeth Gould (psychologist)

Gould was born in 1962[1] and received her Ph.D. in behavioral neuroscience in 1988 at UCLA. In 1989, she joined the lab of Bruce McEwen at Rockefeller University as a postdoctoral researcher[10] investigating the effect of stress hormones on rat brains. Gould's research focused on the death of cells in the hippocampus. While Gould was documenting the degeneration of these brains, she discovered evidence that pointed to the idea that the brain might also heal itself.[11]

Confused by this anomaly, Gould assumed she must have been making some simple experimental error, and she went to the Rockefeller library, hoping she could find an explanation as to what she was doing wrong. She ended up looking through numerous papers in the Rockefeller stacks. Several 1962 papers revealed the research at MIT by Joseph Altman claiming that adult rats, cats, and guinea pigs all formed new neurons. Altman's results had been at first ridiculed, then ignored, and quickly forgotten in favor of Pasko Rakic's findings.[12]

Further investigation by Gould revealed that a decade later Michael Kaplan, at the University of New Mexico, had used an electron microscope to image neurons giving birth. Kaplan had, he believed, discovered new neurons everywhere in the mammalian brain, including the cortex.[13][1] However, other scientists continued to support Rakic's doctrine which denied the possibility of neurogenesis in mammals. Kaplan is reported as remembering Rakic telling him that “Those [cells] may look like neurons in New Mexico, but they don't in New Haven.”[14] Like Altman before him, Kaplan abandoned his work in neurogenesis.[14]

Gould spent the next eight years quantifying endless numbers of radioactive rat hippocampi in pursuit of neurogenesis. Gould became a member of the Princeton faculty in 1997. The very next year, in a series of papers, Gould began documenting neurogenesis in primates, directly confronting Rakic's data. She demonstrated that adult marmosets created new neurons in their brains, especially in the olfactory cortex and the hippocampus.[14] By 1999, Rakic admitted that neurogenesis was real.[14] To that end he published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that reported seeing new neurons in the hippocampus of macaques.[15]

Gould's laboratory at Princeton studies the production of new neurons in the early postnatal and adult mammalian brain. Her laboratory explores issues related to the regulation of cell production and survival in three brain regions the hippocampus, the olfactory bulb and the neocortex in rodents and primates (marmosets and macaques).[16]

Gould and her colleagues believe the answer to the question, ‘What possible function could late-generated cells serve?’ could have immense significance in neuroscience and their investigations are guided mostly by this question. Gould and her team are also endeavoring to discover how hormones modulate the production of new neurons and how experience affects new cell production and if so, through what underlying mechanisms.[16]

Gould received a multitude of awards throughout the duration of her career. From 1989 to 1991, Gould was awarded an NRSA Individual postdoctoral fellowship.[24] From 1991 to 1992, she was awarded the WinstonTri-Institutional (Rockefeller, Cornell, Sloan-Kettering) fellowship. From 1992 to 1993, she was awarded an American Paralysis Association grant.[25] From 1993 to 1994, she was awarded the NIMH RO3 small grant. From 1994 to 1996, she was awarded the NARSAD Young Investigator Award.[11] From 1994 to 1999, she was awarded the NIMH FIRST award. In 2000, she was awarded the National Academy of Sciences Troland Award.[26] In 2006, she was awarded the NARSAD Distinguished Investigator Award.[11] In 2009 she was awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal by the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) for her groundbreaking work on neurogenesis.[27]