Episode 106 - Wilma A. Bainbridge: "You have room to pursue your wacky, fun, crazy ideas."

The University of Chicago Assistant Professor Wilma A. Bainbridge, from the Department of Psychology, leads the Brain Bridge Lab, which focuses on examining the bridge between perception and memory, through the lens of psychophysical experiments, neuroimaging, and drawing studies. In this episode, she talks about her undergraduate experience as a professional guinea pig, studying abroad in Japan, learning languages, and finding her way to researching memory. Professor Bainbridge's career path to becoming a University of Chicago professor continues to evolve as she grows in her multiple roles as a mentor, researcher, mother, and many more. 

Transcript

Lee 00:01
Hello, and welcome to The Course. I'm your host today, Lee. And I'm speaking with Associate Professor, Wilma Bainbridge from the Department of Psychology. She leads the Brain Bridge Lab, which focuses on examining the bridge between perception and memory through the lens of psychophysical experiments, neuroimaging and drawing studies.

Professor Bainbridge is here to talk to us about her career path and how she became a University of Chicago professor.

Welcome to The Course, Professor Wilma Bainbridge. It is a pleasure to have you with us today.

Wilma Bainbridge 00:37
Thanks for having me. 

Lee 00:38
So Wilma, let's get started with a general overview of your career path. Let's start in your undergrad years and take me to your current position today at the University of Chicago.

Wilma Bainbridge 00:50
Yeah, so I went to college at Yale University. I studied cognitive science there with a focus on artificial intelligence. So, I was really into robotics at the time. So actually, like the first day of Intro to Computer Science, I approached a professor there, Brian Scassellati and asked if I could watch his lab meetings. And so, I joined in his social robotics lab and I really enjoyed it there, I conducted some research. At the same time, I was also volunteering for a lot of neuroscience studies a lot of them with Professor Marvin Chun's lab. And I participate in so many studies that grad students are asked if I want to sit on their lab meetings. So I ended up being a part of two labs, the Visual Neuroscience Lab and the Social Robotics Lab at Yale.

 It got me really into research, like I was able to go present at conferences and write papers. And so, after that I went to do a little more robotics at the University of Tokyo for a year. But I ultimately realized that my, I was really interested in neuroscience. I mean, from the beginning, I was really interested in how the human mind works and I was also really good at computational stuff. So I thought robotics was the path for me, but after a while I realized, at the time especially, that robotics was not really at the stage of being able to answer questions about the human mind, so that's why I switched to neuroscience. And luckily I was able to combine those passions of both understanding the human mind, but using computational methods when I did my PhD at MIT with Aude Oliva in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. After that, I went on to do a few years of postdoctoral research at the National Institute of Mental Health with Chris Baker.

And then that brought me here to the University of Chicago. Yeah, and I really love it here so far.

Lee 02:42
Wonderful. So tell me a little bit about the research that you do. And if you could explain it to me like I'm a sophomore in high school, that would be amazing.

Wilma Bainbridge 02:53
Yeah, so you would think that we've all had unique experiences, you know, we are unique individuals, and we've all seen different things throughout our lives. But we've found that surprisingly, there's a lot of similarity across people and what we remember and forget. And so, as a result, some images are just intrinsically memorable, like everyone remembers them, and some are intrinsically forgettable.

And so, what our lab does is try to quantify what makes something memorable. Can we use this concept of memorability to make predictions about people's memory? Can we use this towards creating better diagnostic tools for early stages of Alzheimer's disease? And then also what's going on in the brain when viewing memorable or forgettable images.

Our labs also are interested in what is the visual content of our memories once we encode them into memory. And we look at that through using some AI, like machine learning techniques, but also by having people draw what their memories look like, and then quantifying those drawings using online experiments and also computational methods.

Lee 03:56
And then on your path to becoming a professor, not necessarily an easy one, filled with challenges, I'm assuming here, who are the people that supported you the most?

Wilma Bainbridge 04:08
Yeah, so, I was getting into, the field, like psychology, neuroscience, and also using computational methods at a time where it was still fairly rare for there to be women in these STEM fields. And sometimes I would encounter some resistance, like people not expecting me to be able to program something or… but I feel like I'm really fortunate to have had mentors throughout my life who were incredibly supportive and didn't treat me any differently, even if I might have been the only girl in the lab.

And so definitely a big shout outs to Brian Scassellati, or Scazz, the robotics professor, who was the first person who believed in my ability to do research and let me join his lab, and he helped support me in conducting my own independent research projects, which is, and I was able to present this at a conference, and this is still one of my most cited papers today, even though I don't do robotics anymore.

Also, I was really inspired by my PhD advisor, because I think coming into my PhD, I'm very like logical, at the time, I was very, like, by the books in a way. But Aude Oliva, she is such a creative force and she really inspired me to think how, she really taught me how to think creatively and how to be innovative in my research.

Also, my postdoctoral advisor, Chris Baker, has been an incredible support. I mean, we still chatted every week for like years after I finished my postdoctoral fellowship with him. And I think of him as like a close colleague and friend in the field. So, I think I've just been so lucky to have these incredibly supportive mentors. 

And also the graduate students of these professors. So the graduate students who brought me into visual neuroscience, they're all faculty now, but like Julie Golomb, Andy Leber, some of them are postdocs too. I was an undergrad there at the Visual Neuroscience Lab at Yale when they were all these like superstar grad students, postdocs, who were really inspirational to me and also like helped teach me how to do like programming in MATLAB and like they were just so supportive even though I was this shy, awkward undergraduate who didn't know what I wanted to do.

Lee 06:22
Wilma, what would you say were the biggest challenges you faced during your career path thus far? And how did you overcome them?

Wilma Bainbridge 06:30
Yeah, so, sometimes it can be a high stress, academia can be a high stress environment, and sometimes people, like your colleagues, they might be supportive and collaborative, but sometimes they might also be very competitive. So I did feel sometimes, like, especially during grad school, people might be comparing how many publications we had or questioning my programming skills, and I would say, you know, sometimes in these competitive environments, just you need, I think it really helps to have good self-awareness to know what you're good at and what you're bad at. 

So I was pretty confident in my ability to code and my research productivity. So even with any surrounding negativity, I never let it faze me because I knew it wasn't accurate.

And also, it gets better. So now as a professor, I feel so much warmth from my colleagues, you know, such a like collaborative spirit and so much enthusiasm for science from the people around me. So, I guess if you ever feel like at any stage you're in some environment where you have some, you know, people who want to knock you down, I think it won't last the whole time if you stick with it.

Lee 07:40
And why did you decide to become an academic or a professor as opposed to, you know, something else within the fields that you're interested in?

Wilma Bainbridge 07:50
Yeah, I had considered medical school and also considered a more industry, like, computational path. But ultimately, I find just, everything, I find it just so rewarding being in academia. You get to do so many different things. 

So, you know, it's not just doing science and statistics, but you also get to do some graphic design. You get to give talks, you get to engage with the public, you get to teach, and you get to mentor. And I feel like it's just never boring being an academic. Also, this idea that you can just pursue whatever you're interested in without worrying about profit. I mean, you need to worry about grant funds a little bit, but you still have room to pursue like your wacky, fun, crazy ideas.

Like, recently we published a study on this popular internet meme called the Mandela Effect, and it actually was a pretty successful study. We basically found that people do have these consistent false memories that have been reported in the Mandela Effect, like the Monopoly man doesn't have a monocle.

So we did the first empirical study of this effect and it actually got like a lot of media coverage and a lot of students and researchers interested in the effect and so in industry, you know, because I wouldn't be able to profit off of this Mandela effect thing It would be this wacky idea that would just die in my mind and I would never be able to pursue it so I feel like it's just so rewarding being able to pursue research. And because there's so many different things you can do, if one thing's not working out, like let's say all your experiments are not working out, you can then focus on something else. Like mentorship is also incredibly rewarding or teaching.

Lee 09:27
Wilma, can you tell me a little bit more about your experience abroad?

Wilma Bainbridge 09:31
Yeah. So I spent a, I mentioned earlier that I spent a year at the University of Tokyo actually working in a robotics lab, right after undergraduate. So, luckily I was really fortunate in that there were several fellowships available as an undergrad. So, I was able to spend actually a total of two and a half years in Japan and this was a really amazing experience for me. 

So, my mom is actually Japanese, but I grew up only speaking English. And I wasn't able to really get to know much about Japanese culture. Like, I didn't know many other Japanese people around me growing up in the D.C. area. So, when I had to take a foreign language in college, I opted to study Japanese so that I could sort of connect with my culture.

And they had this great fellowship program where I was able to study abroad for a summer and then I loved it so much I took a year off and studied abroad for a whole year in Kyoto and that time was focused on learning the language. And then after I graduated, I spent a year working in a robotics lab in Japanese.

And it's crazy. It's sort of like, these movies where someone time travels or like teleports to another world and then they have to learn about that new world, but then it like opens up to them. 

So when I was I was able to finally speak Japanese fluently. I feel like I opened up this whole new world to me. You know, I was able to interact with everyone, go to all the shops, and I made so many valuable friends. I was able to present at some conferences in Japanese and write a paper in Japanese. And it really inspired me to just pursue learning other languages and learning about other countries and travel. Because it's just so rewarding, this feeling of unlocking a whole world that you couldn't access before. 

And, it's great now, like I recently had twin babies, and they're still babies now, they're almost turning a year old, but I look forward to, like, teaching them Japanese and teaching them about Japanese culture as they grow up.

Lee 11:40
So, your research at the moment really focuses on memory, is that correct?

Wilma Bainbridge 11:45
Yes

Lee 11:46
So, what is it about memory that has captured your interest? Why that?

Wilma Bainbridge 11:52
 Yeah, so, memory is something that intuitively everyone thinks about and has. It's really fun when I tell like an Uber driver on the way to the airport about my research because it can connect with anyone, you know. We all want to know how we can make ourselves remember things better or we want to know why we remember this like random face we saw yesterday but not someone we're trying to remember.

So I think, and there's sort of, I feel like the field of memory has been going through a big revolution. There are just new ways to test memory as people are using like social media apps to record their memories there's also just like new methods and in like brain imaging that let us look at a finer grain scale of what's happening during memory.

And so, it's such a rich field with a lot of potential, but it also is intuitively interesting and connects with a lot of people. And I think that's what got me really passionate about memory. I also can't undersell that some of it was just by luck of ending up in memory labs. 

So to delve a little deeper into why I even started in neuroscience when I was having a great time in this robotics lab, I just, as an undergrad, to make extra money to be able to travel I volunteered for lots and lots of studies.

If you're a student listening in, I recommend you to try this out if you're interested in learning about psychology, because then you can really get to know about many different fields. I remember the very first MRI study I participated in they were just showing me like highly emotional photos and it was pretty jarring.

But at the same time, it was also really interesting to think about what was the underlying question that the researchers were trying to ask. And I ended up participating in enough studies, I was making like $10,000 a year, because I was just like a professional guinea pig. And because I kept asking researchers about what the, what they were studying, that's when the Visual Neuroscience Lab members invited me to join their lab meetings and they were doing studies on memory. But also, I had, I really enjoyed participating in these studies of memory, like testing myself and trying to guess what aspect of memory they're trying to study, so I think, yeah, if you're interested in psychology, but not sure what specific topic within psychology, try participating in some studies and that might help.

Lee 14:14
So Wilma, what continues to inspire you in this field? What are the things that are happening that make you really excited about the future?

Wilma Bainbridge 14:22
Yeah. So I've mentioned all these exciting new methods, so for example, we recently made a, deep learning neural network that can take in an image and predict how likely people are to remember an image, like how memorable is that image. And many of you probably have heard about deep learning because it is creating quite a buzz in the news in the last few years. Because deep learning is what’s giving us these really impressive… it helps with like automatic driving, these like deep fakes, like these like, how they're able to insert deceased actors into movies, but it also can do things like make predictions about people's memory from an image. 

So that's one sort of new thing happening in the field that I'm really excited about, but also in terms of the future of academia. I feel like students like incoming grad student applications are just getting stronger and stronger every year. And I'm just amazed that how like smart and creative and motivated and passionate a lot of the young academics are. And so that's one thing I'm really excited about is meeting them and interacting with them and also just seeing, like how the future of young academics evolve.

Lee 15:38
So Wilma, what is the most fun part of being a professor?

Wilma Bainbridge 15:42
I feel like one of the most fun moments is when you have a hypothesis with your students and you're at that moment where you're like huddled around the computer and about to hit enter to see is that result significant or not. And then they hit enter and it's significant and you're like, wow, we just discovered something amazing and you're like cheering and high fiving.

It's almost like watching a sports game and seeing your team make a goal. Of course, even if it doesn't end up being significant, it ends up that is really interesting to, you know, we still like delve into that, but that feeling of, wow, we just made a discovery. Is this like, really exciting, very like, arresting feeling?

And then you start to imagine the future and like, what does this mean about the field? I feel like that's a really rare, fun feeling that you don't often get in many jobs. It's like, excitement, anticipation, and then reward, yeah, another fun thing is also giving talks. 

So when I was young, like middle school age, I hated giving presentations. Like I was a kid whose voice would be shaking. I would always want to go last. I would forget what I'm saying and stumbling on my words. So I really hated public speaking, and even now, I still get nervous before anything any public speaking events. Even teaching, I get a little nervous still beforehand, but when it's done, it feels so rewarding, and just when you're giving your talk, and you see people's faces start to light up as they connect with your research, or get excited about your research, and then when they come up to you afterwards and ask you questions, and like want to collaborate with you, That feeling is also incredibly rewarding, just connecting with people, when talking about your work.

Lee 17:25
And then Wilma, what are your goals for yourself? Like, what are your future aspirations in this field and in your work?

Wilma Bainbridge 17:32
Yeah. So, my answer might have differed if you asked me two years ago. So, one big thing is that, yeah, so I had these twin girls in October 2022 and it's been really interesting, sort of juggling both like academic work and being a mother at the same time. And one thing I feel very fortunate about is that this academic path has been really supportive.

So, I was able to take sabbatical, so I could still focus on research, but also spend a lot of time with my kids. And even attending conferences, they often will have extra funds to help provide childcare while you're at the conference but so one of my goals is to -

I really hope 5 years from now, I'll be able to look back and feel like I was a great academic and I was a great mother. I really hope that I don't pick one and sort of neglect the other and I think that's really hard to do, but that's the goal that I'm striving for.

But then in terms of research, one thing is a lot of our work has been in the visual domain like looking at memory for images And so I'm hoping in the next several years, we can sort of expand out to what memories really look like. They're not just visual, they have sound, smell, touch, they're moving, they're dynamic and they might have a mix of like verbal information, fuzzy visual information, and then clear information. So I really want to move towards looking at more naturalistic, more real world memory, and more multimodal memory.

Lee 19:08
And what advice would you have for someone who's interested in following a similar path to yours?

Wilma Bainbridge 19:15
I think one of the things that helped me the most in becoming a professor and being an academic is being really efficient and aware of my time. So I am not really a perfectionist. I think I am good at balancing, like, time efficiency, and so I think it's really important to have a sense of how you're spending your time, like setting clear but realistic goals for yourself of like, I will finish writing this part of this paper by Friday, you know.

I think one thing that many young academics or academics at any stage can get stuck in is maybe overestimating or underestimating how long it would take them to do something and overestimating how quickly they can do something. So, if you have an unrealistic sense of your time, like you think you can do it by Friday, but really you need three more weeks, then that actually gives you a lot of added pressure, you feel stressed because you actually won't make this deadline you've set for yourself, and I think it actually makes you slower in the end.

Like, as a professor interacting with students, I prefer if they give me a realistic sense, like, I'm sorry, Professor Brainbridge, this is really complicated, so it's going to take me four weeks to do. I prefer that more than them promising one week, but then not being able to reach it in time. 

So time management and related to that, make sure to prioritize also having personal time. So as a grad student, I would say I spent maybe. I did rarely spent more than 40 hours a week doing research. I sort of saw it as a job. Like I come in the morning, I leave in the evening and then in the nights and the weekends, I'm not doing work unless there's some like very intense deadline. And so I made sure to have hobbies I was passionate about pursuing because of having this wonderful experience in Japan as an undergraduate in grad school, I was really interested in learning languages and traveling. So I was like learning like Korean and Arabic and Chinese and American sign language. I was like taking all these language classes. I was working hard to get to conferences that let me travel to related countries. 

I just made sure to always have like these other passions, so I wasn't purely defined by my research. Like, many academics will feel proud of pulling an all nighter, or like, working until midnight. But I think that's something you should try and avoid, and that's something to be proud about, or like, compare with your colleagues.

Lee 21:41
And finally, Wilma, what is the most fulfilling part of the work that you do?

Wilma Bainbridge 21:46
So, really seeing, like, light bulbs go off in my students minds is the most fulfilling, so when I'm interacting with students in my lab and then that moment where they come to me with a new project idea that they want to explore or when they like think of a new type of analysis to try or when they do something independently, that's really fulfilling because it's a moment that I feel like, wow, I'm actually helping to raise the next generation of researchers.

And that's also a mark of a successful academic is being able to generate your own ideas and given a really complex data set, be able to think of how would you parse this out? Like, how would you approach it and make it digestible? And so, when I see my students being able to do that, it’s really fulfilling.

Also, when I see my students give talks, and I feel like, wow, they hit a home run, that was fantastic, that's also really fulfilling. So, I feel like one of the most fulfilling parts is just really seeing your own students that you're mentoring just be successful and grow and I'm still pretty early on. 

So, I joined the University of Chicago's Department of Psychology in January 2020, actually right before the pandemic, it was just me and my lab manager. We had just ordered furniture and everything shut down. Now we're back in person, but, because our lab is still pretty new, I still haven't had PhD students who have graduated. So I imagine it's going to be really fulfilling when I see them leaving my lab. I'm really excited, but also a little bit nervous. Like, I hope I can give them a successful path in their future. 

And also, one other thing I find fulfilling is engaging with the public with the research. So recently I gave a talk at the Chicago Science Festival, which was one of my first talks that was to a non-science audience, and it was so cool seeing that I could even connect with the average person and many members of the audience came up to me and asked me questions after my talk, and even just speaking with like journalists, and when people write about our research, it's also very fulfilling to see. Hey, we're actually doing something that people care about. It's not just something that's just going to stay in the scientific journal and die there, yeah, so those are some of the most fulfilling parts of the research that we do.

Lee 24:12
 Thank you Professor Wilma Bainbridge for your time today. And Course Takers, if you enjoyed listening to today's interview, please check out the other ones. Leave us a comment, subscribe, follow, and share this episode with your friends and family. You can find out more about the University of Chicago through uchicago.edu, or the university's campus in Hong Kong through uchicago.hk. Stay tuned for more and thanks for listening.