Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
Dr. Michael Treadway is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor in Psychology and Director of Clinical Training in the Department of Psychology at Emory University. He is also affiliated with the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory. Michael received his PhD in clinical psychology from Vanderbilt University and completed his clinical internship and post-doctoral fellowship at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School. He joined the faculty at Emory in 2015. Michael has received numerous awards and honors in his career, including the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution in the area of Psychopathology from the American Psychological Association (APA), the Randolph Blake Early Career Award from Vanderbilt University, the Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science (APS), the Early Career Impact Award from the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS), and the Rising Star Award from the APS. In this interview, he shares more about his life and science.
People Behind the Science Podcast Show Notes
Life Outside of Science (2:40)
Michael and his wife love spending time with their two young children and playing games together, particularly card games. He also enjoys playing the piano, listening to music, and going to live music performances.
The Scientific Side (4:08)
One of the aims of Michael’s lab is to investigate how the brain makes decisions about where to invest your effort and whether something you want is worth the work it will take to get it. The second aim of Michael’s research is to examine this process in people with conditions like major depression. His goal is to understand how the relevant circuitry in the brain typically works, and how the circuitry changes in depression, leading to a different set of decisions. This work has the potential to help identify new targets for interventions.
A Dose of Motivation (7:24)
“Pain is a great teacher. Agony is not.”
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.” – Philo
What Got You Hooked on Science? (13:17)
Michael’s career path didn’t lead him straight to academic research. Though initially drawn to science and invention in childhood, he shifted his focus to humanities in high school and through college. He was interested in writing, history, politics, and critical theory, and he was also a music major in college. Towards the end of college, Michael started to feel disenchanted with his areas of study, and he needed to find a job quickly. When he graduated in the late 90s – early 2000s, it was the peak of the dot-com boom, and Michael joined an internet startup company. He enjoyed the work, but after several years, he started to really miss academia and thinking deeply about ideas. Michael felt lost and struggled with depression. Introduced to Buddhist psychology by his father, Michael became fascinated with psychology, the mind, and the science behind it all. Along the way, he realized that he also wanted to incorporate clinical practice in his career. Both of Michael’s parents are clinicians, and he wanted to pursue a path where he could help people. This led him to choose clinical psychology. After going back to take the necessary undergraduate courses in psychology, Michael enrolled in graduate school, determined to find success and fulfillment in academic research.
The Low Points: Failures and Challenges (28:22)
About five years ago, Michael was coming to the end of the first series of major projects and funded grants in his lab. His efforts to get new grants funded were becoming increasingly frantic with each rejection he received, and the lab was rapidly running out of money. As lab members graduated or moved on to other positions, Michael wasn’t able to hire replacements, and it was really discouraging to see his lab shrinking.
Taking a step back, Michael recognized that his research field had really changed. The ideas he had and the methods that he developed and was trained in were no longer the most advanced, most cutting-edge ideas and approaches. He dedicated a sabbatical to reading new literature and learning a lot of new computational methods like machine learning. Michael made major changes to how he approached the core questions he was answering, and he partnered with junior colleagues in the department who had complementary expertise. Within a few years, Michael had multiple grants funded, and he was able to grow his research program again.
A Shining Success! (32:18)
Work in the lab focused on advancing our understanding of the neural circuitry involved in motivation and effort-based decision making is relevant for helping people with conditions like depression. One of their goals is to identify potential subtypes of depression that have unique pathophysiology that makes individuals responsive to different types of treatments beyond those traditionally used today. A month ago, Michael and his team published results from a clinical trial that was eight years in the making and built upon interesting findings from prior studies.
Results from their trial showed that a potent anti-inflammatory drug improved motivation-related symptoms in patients who were both depressed and had evidence of high levels of inflammation in their blood. The participants were more willing to expend effort for rewards in the behavioral tasks, and there were changes in brain circuits associated with decision-making. In addition, the extent of behavioral and brain circuitry changes after taking the drug corresponded with the changes in blood markers of inflammation. This was a very exciting success and the findings pave the way for new and more personalized approaches to treating disorders like depression.
Book Recommendations (39:44)
The Knowledge Machine: How Irrationality Created Modern Science by Michael Strevens and God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning by Meghan O’Gieblyn
Most Treasured Travel (44:50)
Generally, Michael prefers smaller conferences, and some of his favorites over the years are the ones where he was so engaged in the meeting that he ended up doing very little sightseeing. One year, Michael attended the Dopamine Conference in Sardinia, an Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea. The island was absolutely beautiful, and they enjoyed a gorgeous conference-wide dinner in spectacular gardens just outside the city. There were a few hundred attendees at the meeting, and he really got to know everyone there, which was wonderful.
Quirky Traditions and Funny Memories (46:48)
Michael loves to hear about new results in the lab, and he didn’t realize how excited he got until his lab members pointed it out to him. They mentioned that he gets a particular look on his face when someone is going to share new results, and a lab member managed to capture his expression on camera. One of the postdocs in the lab then created a new emoticon called the “excited Treadway” where Michael is making the famed face, and now they use this emoticon all the time in the lab’s Slack channels to convey excitement about data or results.
Advice For Us All (49:44)
When you’re trying to make a big decision about what to do in life or what career path to take, don’t think about what the accolades, achievements, or milestones could look like. Instead, think about what a typical day would be like and how you would spend most of your time. Reflect on how you really want to spend your time.
Also, it is possible to strike a balance. You don’t have to work all the time in order to be successful. However, in science, there is so much difficulty, rejection, tough days, and things that don’t work out that if you don’t really love and find meaning in your research, the other rewards of the job may not really be worth it. We shouldn’t talk about careers as “a calling” to justify grueling hours or extreme hardship, but if you’re finding that long hours in the lab aren’t really a source of joy (rather than frustration), then science may not be the right fit.
Guest Bio
Michael is a clinical psychologist and cognitive neuroscience who seeks to understand the neural circuitry that guides our willingness to invest effort, and how that circuitry is impacted by mental illness. To this end, his laboratory develops novel laboratory paradigms to explore cost/benefit preferences that are used in conjunction with neuroimaging, experimental pharmacology, and neuromodulation techniques. Outside of the lab he is a dedicated amateur pianist, runner, aspirational home chef, husband and father to Jacob, age 7, and Lily, age 1.
Leave a Reply