A “Lab” of One’s Own
By Natalia Diaz NU’11 and Jim Stellar
Our old lab at Northeastern University, back in the early 2000s, became a kind of first home away from home for me, a place where I felt safe, challenged, and grounded in a new life.
For me, our old behavioral neuroscience lab was a place where, as a professor, I had the incredible experience of working at the bench with undergraduate students like you, from diverse backgrounds who brought strength, commitment, and a professionalism beyond their years.
Now you and I are back together online, working on your career development after a long pause during which you earned MS and MBA degrees and started your own company. So first, catch us up.
After graduation, my career took me from biotech R&D to innovation consulting, but the foundation came from our lab. What made our lab so special wasn’t just the research, but its flexible structure. It was a space where you could walk in as a freshman, barely sure of yourself, and be treated not as a helper or trainee, but as a contributor. It was rare then, and it feels even rarer now. There was no academic pecking order in a traditional sense, just students who had been there longer and knew how to guide you without pulling rank. The stakes were high enough to matter, but the space felt safe enough to try, fail, and try again.
That was terrific. Now let’s talk about the parallels between that lab experience and what we hope to do now to continue your career development around your passions. Start with the lab.
The moment I truly felt like I belonged in the lab came pretty early. I’d been reading about the neurobiology of addiction (the focus of our lab’s research) and honed in on relapse as an interesting avenue to pursue. Following my curiosity, I asked for a meeting with you, Jim, to pitch this idea. It felt a little daunting, given your position at the time and how early on in my tenure at the lab it was. But you not only immediately agreed to meet, but you truly listened – giving weight to my thinking. This confidence building was transformative. There’s something about the brain of a young person that rewires when their ideas matter. It made me more ambitious, more serious. I started spending more and more time at the lab, asking questions I wasn’t sure I had the skills or right to ask. And the environment was so encouraging of this, that was the magic.
We developed a mentoring relationship as you discussed that bridged all that separated us. Talk about that.
One pleasant surprise was how personally close we all became. It’s a bit of a cliché, but it truly felt like family, especially to someone young like me. We spent holidays together, supported each other through the hardest times and celebrated each other’s wins. I still have books that belonged to your father, he gifted them to me so I would never forget my scientific family history – books belonging to my ‘scientific grandfather’ as you put it.
Can you go deeper on this idea of your growth and what drove it?
This sense of safety and freedom became a blueprint. It made me realize the longer I was in the workforce how rare intentional cultures like that are, and how much they depend on who’s in charge. Our lab made me so much more curious about human experience, about what underlies behavior. This kept me in biotech R&D for a while (my first career after college), exploring underlying mechanisms of disease to try and develop new treatments. But the more I veered away from science in my later career, the more I wanted to return to the core of what we did together 20 years ago: deeply exploring needs before creating solutions. In my later work, that meant driving innovation and shaping workplace cultures so people could do their best work in ways that were meaningful to them. Now, I want to take that same commitment to understanding and advocacy into constitutional and civil rights law.
OK. Now talk about your interest in the law.
For me, the move toward law feels like an extension of what began in our lab. Back then, we were studying behavior to understand the forces that shape it. Since then, I’ve seen how those forces often come from the systems and rules we live under. In healthcare, in companies and in communities, those rules can create the conditions for people to live and be productive members of society in ways that are fulfilling, or quietly take them away. Civil rights and constitutional law are a way to work on those conditions directly, with the same curiosity and commitment to people that first took root all those years ago.
What we want to say here is several things that are illustrated by this experience “of our own,” a coming together of people, like in that old laboratory, that promotes the growth of all its members, like a family.
First, this is what we say in this blog series about the impact of experiential education (e.g. an internship in a workplace) on an undergraduate’s career plans based on their chosen major(s). We say it is brain-natural. That is because all of us live and operate at two levels. The first is the conscious person we are and about which we can speak as the reasons for doing something. Evolution added to a functioning nervous system, the cerebral cortex. It is built on a different structure than the limbic system and brain stem that we believe preceded them. The cortex’s columns allow more abstract representations of outcomes, which underlie our language and thinking. The pinnacle of this cortical development is the frontal cortex which really seems to be in charge of our forward planning, e.g. I want to be a lawyer and for the following reasons.
Second is this older part of the brain that is represented particularly by the limbic system. It seems to be in charge of creating value for the organism through its behavior: Eat when hungry (an enjoy it), avoid things that hurt or threaten (and fear them). On the one hand we have the nucleus accumbens and its famous dopamine neurotransmission that we in the “old lab” studied in rats from the perspective of cocaine addiction – a reward system gone crazy and beyond being healthy. On the other hand, we have the amygdala that seems to be overactive in PTSD, where the patient cannot move past the fear from a past trauma. In both of these cases a therapist will try to engage the planning executive function of the frontal cortex to change the behavior despite this limbic input. In a better situation, this limbic input tells the planning frontal cortex that what the person is doing is good for them.
The issue is that the limbic system operates in its calculations and plans outside the awareness of the neocortex except to provide to it the summary judgement on the plan or action. So we know that supporting a student provides the outcome we discussed above, even if we do not have the words to say exactly why and even more why that mentoring relationship developed between those two individuals. We may be tempted to call it “chemistry,” even if it is not as concrete as signing up for an MBA or MS degree with its clear time, effort, cost, and outcomes.
But that is how one builds a lab of one’s own in any organization where people interact and learn together.
