New Faculty Member Mike Wallace Makes a Splash at BU
Neurobiologist Michael Wallace, PhD, joined Boston University about a year and a half ago when the BU community, and indeed the world, were reeling from the early effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. And the impacts of the pandemic, especially the lockdowns and the social isolation that came with them, have shaped the growth of his lab at the university.
“I came to be really interested in the neural mechanisms underlying depression, anxiety and stress,” he says. “These have come to be driving ideas in my lab. We have been trying to understand how the brain responds to stress and how this changes in people with depression, and how treatments can address those circuits in the brain to provide a therapeutic benefit.”
Wallace’s lab at BU explores the role of specific circuits within the basal ganglia in guiding motivated behaviors and controlling goal-directed motor actions, and how these processes can be affected in disease and in disorders like Parkinson’s disease and drug addiction. So the group is well positioned to tackle these challenges. In seeking to elucidate the underpinnings of behaviors and motor actions, they call on techniques including in vivo optogenetics, computer programming, and a range of behavioral and imaging techniques.
Here is where the lab intersects with the Neurophotonics Center. Wallace has already launched a collaboration with the NPC – which could see his lab using the miniscope the center has developed, for example – and is excited for what the future may hold.
“The NPC has been on the cutting edge of so many optical techniques used in neuroscience,” he says. “I wanted to get involved not only because I think it would be a great resource as I push those optical approaches in my own lab but also because I’m always interested in what else is out there – what else don’t I know about.”
While he is relatively new to BU, Wallace is no stranger to the Boston area. He often visited Cape Cod as a child and always hoped he would find his way back to the area – not least because of his abiding love of the ocean.
“One of the reasons I moved to Boston after doing my PhD in North Carolina was to be closer to the ocean,” Mike says. Most of his favorite things to do – fishing, diving, surfing – involve the ocean. “People don’t thing of surfing when they think of Boston but, as long as you don’t mind the cold water, you can surf year-round – which I do.” He also maintains a keen interest in understanding the environmental impacts of human behaviors, including fishing, and generally keeping the oceans clean.
In fact, his love of the sea is what started Mike on the road to where he is today. “I was originally interested in science because I wanted to be a marine biologist,” he says. In college, he took a basic cell biology class where he learned about the many different cell types in the body. “That quickly took me down the path of neuroscience; I quickly realized that the coolest cells in the body were neurons.”
From there, he grew ever-more intrigued by questions of how these fundamental units of life work as part of a larger system, how they guide many of our behaviors and motor actions, and how these processes can be affected in disease. No doubt he will continue to shed important light on these through his collaboration with the NPC.