Scientist Spotlight: Q&A with BJ Casey, PhD

BJ Casey is a professor of psychology, member of the Justice Collaboratory in the Yale Law School and of the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program at Yale University, in addition to visiting investigator at The Rockefeller University. Her work focuses on brain imaging to uniquely examine developmental transitions across the life span, especially during the period of adolescence.

In lay-friendly terms, what’s the big question your work is designed to answer?

How the brain has evolved to help us meet the unique challenges of each developmental phase of life. Much of my work focuses on the adolescent brain and trying to understand why adolescents do what they do. Look at all the challenges of this time in our development, yet most of us successfully make it through our adolescence.

What recent discoveries in the field have recently gotten you most excited?

There are so many to mention so I’ll just answer this more generally: I love looking at the developing and “behaving” brain. I get excited when a new noninvasive neuroimaging tool comes along for examining human brain function and development more mechanistically. Also, when any new animal work that constrains my research is published. Currently, I’m really excited about recent advances in diffusion imaging and in high field magnet approaches that allow us to move beyond macrostructure to examine microstructure and function.

What question do you wish more people were asking/working on in your area?

Adolescence. I wish more scientists were examining this period of development—extending from the later teens and early twenties—in more representative and diverse samples to better inform medical, legal, and social policies to improve their lives. This is such a formidable period that I believe requires both opportunities and special protections.

What work are you most excited about now?

Information we “forget” across different phases of development and how it may serve an adaptive function. Infantile amnesia is an example of developmental forgetting, although the first few years of life influence who we are even if we can’t recall specific episodes. Adolescence is the same—I have been trying to indirectly examine what I have been calling “adolescence amnesia.” Although this is a period of tremendous learning, there is a lot of information we need to drop to be able to function during adolescence and beyond.

What do you wish you knew when you were first starting off as a new PhD?

How much your research changes with the people around you and tools available. Throughout my career, my mentors, colleagues, postdocs, and students have really influenced the scientific questions I have asked. It is thrilling to share novel ideas with others in a way that clicks and leads to a whole new area of investigation. 

Also, I wish I had valued the uncertainty of science back then. As I say to my students, we are not proving a hypothesis, but rather testing it. I love looking at data that don't quite fit with my predictions. My favorite data and most exciting findings have almost always been unpredicted. I think scientific blinders can get in the way of discovery.