Dr. Mehaffey currently does research on birdsong at the University of California, San Francisco. He earned his PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Calgary in Alberta. He has been published numerous times for his research on the neuroscience of birdsong.
What area do you work in/what is your field of study?
Neurobiology/Neuroethology. Neuroethology being the study of the neural underpinnings of behaviours of a specific animal or species with a specialized behaviour. In this case, the singing of birds, and how song is learned through early childhood experience, maintained in adulthood, and modulated to achieve behavioural goals.
What do you like most/what is most interesting about your job?
The endless questions. There’s always something new to be curious about- every experiment opens new possiblities.
What kinds of jobs are there in this field (for example, where or who can you work for)?
Purely academic. It’s localized mostly in research universities, although a small number of private organizations are starting to consider unusual animals for basic research.
What skills do you find to be most vital to your job? (They could be technical, professional, etc.)
You more or less need a bit of everything- writing, electrical engineering, math, programming, optics, there’s almost nothing that’s not a useful or relevant skill for basic research.
How did you first get started in this field and/or what were some of the most important steps or influences on your journey to becoming a scientist in this field? What do you think a high school student just getting started in this field should do to jumpstart their career?
I got starting in neuroscience during an undergrad lab course taught by Dr. Dorothy Paul at the University of Victoria. It was the first lab course where we were ever given unsupervised access to a lab, and allowed to do our own experiments (rather than supervised replications of textbook experiments, as is the case for most lab courses). It was the first time I was ever able to generate my own hypotheses, design the experiment, and carry it out, rather than being forced to endless replicate other people observations, and made me realize how much fun science could be.
How do you see the future of this field of science playing out?
Neuroscience is in an odd place right now, with a lot of bad metaphors about the brain as a computer, and some very poor interactions with machine learning/”artificial intelligence”/statistics that I think are broadly negative, but there is finally some sensible pushback towards understanding the brain as it is, rather than using a heavy handed metaphor from computer science.
My Reflection:
Thank you firstly to Dr. Mehaffey for answering my questions and giving me some insight into this field of science! I have recently been very curious about neuroscience and its intersection with biology through neurobiology, so it was really cool to hear from someone in this exact field. It was very interesting to learn about neuroethology, which I didn’t even know was a thing before this interview. It is so amazing to read about this very specific vein of science, as it always pleasantly surprises me how narrow science goes. I probably would’ve never thought about the neurology of birdsong before this, so it’s cool to read about this unfamiliar source of study. I totally agree with what Dr. Mehaffey said about the endless questions being the best part of science – that is part of what I love about science: it is always growing and evolving. I also loved his story about getting to finally design his own experiments and seeing how fun science can be. I definitely hope to one day get to that point where I too can design my own experiments and test my own hypotheses! Lastly, I found it super interesting to read what Dr. Mehaffey wrote about the bad metaphors of the brain as a computer. I have definitely heard this comparison a lot, but I haven’t read or heard about a lot of pushback, so it was interesting to hear that and get some fresh insight. Overall, it was super awesome to get this insight into one of the smaller fields within the intersection of neuroscience and biology, since that is an area I am very interested in. Thank you again Dr. Mehaffey for this thoughtful insight!
The Rosalind Project 