BGE Pulse Podcast: Zac Colon, Ph.D. (G’21, G’26), Neuroscience Graduate
On this episode of BGE Pulse, Digital Communications Assistant Benjamin Nochimson (G’27) speaks with Zac Colon (G’21, G’26). Zac earned his M.S. in Integrative Neuroscience in 2021, and this summer he defended his thesis in our Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience to earn his Ph.D. Zac touches on the personal motivations that led him to Georgetown, his involvement in research and student leadership, and an exciting research opportunity in the United Kingdom.
Benjamin Nochimson: Hello and welcome to BGE Pulse, the show where we talk to members of Georgetown’s Biomedical Graduate Education community to learn more about them and talk about what they’ve contributed to Georgetown. Today we talk to Zac Colon. Zac is a 2021 grad of Georgetown’s M.S. in Integrative Neuroscience Program, and he recently just defended his doctoral thesis in Georgetown’s Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience, earning his Ph.D. It was a pleasure to talk to Zac, and please enjoy our conversation.
Intro Music
Benjamin Nochimson: So why don’t we start with, kind of your journey that brought you to Georgetown? I understand that you you’ve already got your M.S. in Integrative Neuro, at Georgetown, and you just defended your thesis, for the interdisciplinary neuroscience program.
Zac Colon: So I’ve submitted my thesis, I guess technically, they have to, like, sort of accept all the revisions, but, like, it’s pretty much done.
Benjamin Nochimson: Nice. Well, congratulations on that. What, what brought you to Georgetown in the first place? Where did you go undergrad?
Zac Colon: Yeah, so I went to University of Washington in Seattle for undergrad, where I studied microbiology and immunology, specifically there is, Kaposi’s sarcoma related herpesvirus, which is a big AIDS opportunistic virus that sort of causes this these little raised red plaques all over the person’s body. So I kind of was always interested in viruses and sort of the immune system from stemming from reading the book The Hot Zone, which was about like a sort of a semi-fiction book about the Ebola virus.
There was an outbreak in Reston, Virginia, and there was like a huge scare that it was gonna go all over the United States, but ended up being one of the ones that was, like, not easily transferable from primates to humans. But ever since then, I was always just kind of amazed by, like, this small intracellular, not even what most people consider an organism, was able to, like, cause like such destruction in the human body.
And then after undergrad, I’m kind of nontraditional. I spent about eight years working in a food pathogen lab where we’re more focused on, like E.coli, Listeria, salmonella, Clostridium difficile. But my dad, he’s a retired Navy SEAL, and in about 2016, he was formally diagnosed with PTSD. A lot of his, like, teammates on the SEALS…a lot of them committed suicide. And I was sort of drawn to, like, why is it my dad…like, he doesn’t seem like he’s at that risk. And one of the big things, I think, is he really created like community outside of the military. He was very much involved in the church and, like my schools, like, he would always be there for me.
And then it sort of shifted my focus in science towards neuroscience because I was kind of drawn to, like I always thought the immune system was the greatest adaptive system in the body. But then now as I learned more about the nervous system, it’s just that it’s like, adaptive and amazing in my mind. So then I started reading more when I was in undergrad, there’s still sort of this like notion that the brain’s like an immunoprivileged organ, like most people thought, like, oh yeah, the immune system’s not really doing anything in there.
But then I started finding about like microglia, astrocytes, and also a lot of immune cell, or I guess immune molecules were actually being used within the brain for some purposes that aren’t even like inflammation-related. So then I was able to kind of connect those together. And then I started volunteering a lot, in the VA’s inpatient neurological unit, and that really taught me about like, sort of the connection of the mind and body.
One of the big things is just like chronic pain. Like, how do some people manage chronic pain, and then other people like, it’s they can’t even get out of bed. And the immune system plays a big role there too. But I then started to get really into traumatic brain injuries. I volunteered at a clinic for traumatic brain injury patients as they recovered. It was not their primary recovery, it was sort of few years after. So a lot of it was like just being able to learn sort of like skills that you do on a day-to-day basis. Also, learning that advocating for these patients was huge as, like they’re really sometimes forgotten about, like, once they get out of six months recovery, oftentimes they’re just kind of left to their own devices.
You have to like sort of hope that they have friends or family that’s willing to support them. And that kind of connected to my background of growing up, being born and raised Catholic, I always believe that part of my journey in any career is actually going to be giving back to the community. And, I think that’s what Georgetown kind of drew me, like the cura personalis and the idea that the body is just as important as the mind when you’re thinking about neuroscience.
But I was kind of, as a first-generation doctoral student, I didn’t really have guidance. I was just really smart growing up. So everybody thought I was going to be like an M.D. And as I learned just through experience, it really wasn’t like meshing well with my personality and I like to think, like really long and deep on the problem rather than I thought like when I was doing my job shadowing.
It’s kind of like you’re just treading water. You have only such a limited time to help patients. And it really sometimes it didn’t even seem like it was really being impactful because like chronic diseases, like it’s hard to just meet with somebody like 30 minutes and you know, figure out what’s going on and helping them. So I thought my personality for sure would be more towards research.
But up until 2021, I still didn’t really know because I didn’t know too much about like a Ph.D. program, sort of what goes into it, what sort of research I could do with it. So I kind of like, say like sometimes, like COVID was kind of a blessing for myself, because it allowed me to sort of stop and think, because I was applying to med schools at the time, I got accepted to a few, but I didn’t want to do like Zoom med school.
I felt like if I’m going to be spending a lot of money, I don’t really want to do it all online. I started looking for programs, and I found the master’s program here was still allowing in-person research. So then I joined and then I met my current mentor, which is Kathy Maguire-Zeiss, as well as my master’s mentor, Mark Burns.
They really, like, were the first mentors I had that treated me as like a person before a scientist. Especially with all the things that were going on at the time. There was the Black Lives Matter movement. Then like halfway through my Ph.D. or my master’s, there was the January 6th insurrections.
They were able to take time and actually talk to me about like those things first before we, like, go over the science. So they really showed me like, what a good mentor, what a good scientist, and what a good person really is. And then I kind of I was doing a lot for MCGSO my master’s year, and then I became president my first year in the Ph.D., and I really, I think helped how I envisioned myself as a scientist and a contributor to like, society and my communities as a whole.
Benjamin Nochimson: What is MCGSO?
Zac Colon: The Medical Center Graduate Student Organization, BGE’s student organization.
Benjamin Nochimson: Nice.
Zac Colon: And so, yeah. And so it kind of was able to bridge everything I was kind of looking for, like, I wanted to be able to be a great scientist, rigorous and actually challenged. But I also wanted to, like, impact my community and have ways that like, you know, like understanding, like the privileges I’ve had in my life and sort of like the blind spots I also had, and it’s been a really good journey through it.
Benjamin Nochimson: Yeah. That’s awesome. Thanks for, you know, going into it and sharing all that. It sounds like you’ve had a very kind of, kind of a, like, varied and kind of checkered career. You know, even before coming to Georgetown, you’ve done a lot of, a lot of really cool stuff, and you’ve given back and stuff and that’s really cool.
Has, has your time at Georgetown, have you been able to explore all those different kind of facets of things that you’re interested in? Because it sounds like you have kind of a wide array of things.
Zac Colon: Yeah. Of course, when you’re in a Ph.D., your time does somewhat get limited. But I was the president for, or vice president for two years of the student organization and then the president for two years. But I was also for the last, I think, three years now, maybe three and a half years, I’ve been a part of the reconciliation fund.
And that, like, was just like a different sort of learning experience, like learning how, like, community based organizations work on sort of how the administrative side of, like, even just being able to pick out good sorts of organizations to give money to, and that will be impactful to the Descendant community. And then it allowed me to also meet a lot of the descendants and really hear their stories and sort of see some of the parallels or some of the differences of, like, my journey, because I was born in Guam, but I moved to Washington State when I was five.
So I always kind of have this feeling of like not being a part of like, like sort of I kind of didn’t feel like had a culture because I was too young when I was around, like the Chamorro culture to really understand it. And then when I was in Washington, there was like nobody else…half the people didn’t even know where Guam is.
So it always led me to like the idea that, like, bridging these sort of feelings and sort of creating a community that I wanted myself and I think all of these different, sort of programs, like I just part of the One Step Ahead Mentorship. I did like our program, we have different like EDI committees, and it just really helped me feel more as like a whole person and not just sort of a scientist and not just like sort of a cog in the sort of research domain.
Benjamin Nochimson: Yeah. That’s fantastic. I’m glad that the kind of the cura personalis lives up to the name. You know, we take it seriously, I guess. Let’s, let’s go into your thesis, if that’s okay. What was your thesis about?
Zac Colon: So I was really interested in sort of sporadic forms of neurodegeneration. There’s a lot of research on all the genetic forms. And we always knew that, like, age was like one of the greatest risk factors for neurodegeneration. So what I study is the dorsal striatum, which is an area, part of the basal ganglia. And it’s associated with like Parkinson’s disease.
But also Huntington’s and HIV-associated neurological disorders. And I kind of wanted to bridge the gap of like what aging and sort of what systemic inflammation does. And how that interacts to possibly lead towards neurodegeneration. So what we did is, we first just studied normal aging. What are the effects? We found that, like as we age, you get sort of a low-grade inflammation called inflammaging, but your brain’s still able to somewhat maintain homeostasis.
So there’s…it’s sort of on the edge but it’s not quite there yet. So it’s not just aging alone. And then we modeled sort of, systemic inflammation. So we used LPS, which is bacterial cell wall component to just trigger sort of your body’s immune system and then see how that can affect the brain.
And we really found that your body, it’s kind of like you have compensatory mechanisms that some of us start to fail as we age, and then sort of how do those sort of mechanisms that might be failing and some of the ones that might be taking over those, how does that actually affect sort of your, your circuit, your neural circuitry?
And to do that, I was studying these…it’s sort of an extracellular matrix that’s called perineuronal nets. And they surround primarily like your inhibitory neurons. And, these neurons are like part of albumin interneurons. And they play a big role in sort of like your brain’s local circuitry as well as, like, oscillations generating those, like, sharp wave ripples, sort of how your brain is able to take information and store it.
And these PNNs are really affected by inflammation. So, if you have an inflammatory sort of insult, they can either get denser or like you can have them broken down by certain, cell types, sort of like microglia, astrocytes. And the main thing about these is that you need a homeo…like there’s a balance. Like too much actually will limit your ability to create new synapses, create new connections.
Too little can actually make some of these synapses exposed to possibly being cleaved, as well as the neurons themselves are going to be more exposed to like reactive oxygen species, the toxic proteins and anything like that. So it was really just trying to figure out if, as you age, if like just getting like an acute sickness, is that even enough to change sort of like your dorsal striatum’s micro environment and your, sort of the, neuronal architecture. But we didn’t, I wish I could have got to the point where I actually was, doing like, what they call e-phys, electrophysiology on these neurons. But I think that would be the next step. But I think we’re able to find that like even one bout of sickness can actually change the way your brain is sort of maintaining its homeostasis.
Benjamin Nochimson: Yeah. Well, that’s super interesting. What, like what does the research look like? Is it mostly lab work that you’re doing, or is there also just like literature reviews that you’re doing? Like what’s it actually look like to accomplish this?
Zac Colon: So it’s both. So a lot of the early work is a lot of literature reviews to sort of set up your experimental designs, sort of like create your hypotheses, find some support. But then after that I do a lot of mouse work. So, the first part was actually just aging them. So I did a lot of behavior to see sort of like how mouse behavior changes with aging and sort of try to connect that to, you know, how humans age.
One of those things is as we age, we become less active and we don’t move as much. And mice kind of show that too, and that is part of the like brain health is like one of the big things is like exercise and sleep. All these things that’s body health, pretty much.
But it ends up being brain health. And then after that, we did a lot of like, it’s called omics analysis. So I did a lot of, like, RNA sequencing, proteomics, that required a lot more like dabbling into, like, coding, being able to take this data set and figure out which, genes are changing, why these genes that change matter, sort of how they fit together.
Like we get giant data sets, they have like tens of thousands of genes sometimes. And then so just being able to work with that and then after that, it’s trying to figure out sort of how all of these changes sort of mesh together and can lead to possibly like neurodegeneration.
Benjamin Nochimson: Interesting. So it’s kind of funny now that like, you have to kind of have this interdisciplinary kind of like mind to be able to do all this stuff. Is that like the norm now or the standard like if you’re going to be, you know, a viable scientist, you have to be able to do this kind of thing now?
Zac Colon: I think it’s becoming more of the norm, but it’s definitely not like what every program does. Like that’s part of the reason why I joined, this is the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience. So half the people are studying humans and using MRI machines and stuff like that. But the good thing about this is, like, everybody gives a seminar each year and, we get a lot of invited speakers.
So I’m able to hear, like, these sides of research and sort of like take some things from that and sort of drive some of my science because, like my goal is to help humans, not cure mouse Parkinson’s.. So of course it’s going to take a team like the amount of work I did like…it’s not…it’s a lot, but it’s still not enough. Like I would never be able to figure out everything on my own. And I can’t really sort of, like there’s too much literature out there too to really just be able to like, go through it all and find what that actually relates to my science. So it’s really helpful to have like some of these leaders in the cognitive field, have some of my fellow cohort members or my fellow classmates that are thinking of, like the brain on a different level than I am.
Like, they might be thinking about like, circuits and sort of how brain areas are communicating. And I’m more on like the cellular and molecular side, like, looking at how cytokines might actually affect both neurons and your immune cells. So I think for neuroscience especially, like it’s always going to take a team. Unless, I guess, like you have a lab with unlimited funds and with unlimited graduate students, like yeah, we’re never going to be able to do anything without a team.
Benjamin Nochimson: Yeah. Well it’s cool that the program sets you up like that to have it, to have a good team to work with. Yeah. I guess what I, I know that, just by doing a little, you know, snooping on LinkedIn, I know that, you’ve had some publications, like of some of your work already. Is that related to your thesis, or is this something you’re pursuing still with your thesis? Are you looking to be published?
Zac Colon: Yeah. So the first the two papers I have published now are mostly like, I guess it’s like one chapter of my thesis. In the second half of my thesis, I’m working on a publication right now. It was kind of put on the backburner because, like, I had to write the whole thesis, but that kind of helped with, like, writing the paper because it’s way more in-depth than what I would put in a manuscript.
But I’m also working with, like, some of the, like, undergrads or other graduate students in our lab to sort of, you know, create projects that might be able to help them get into the paper and or just help my paper, like, get stronger and more impactful. So it’s really like most of the data is done, but like there’s still like some loose ends.
But I am staying around until like the end of August to hopefully get a lot of this done. But yeah, there’s also a lot of projects, a lot of experiments I’ve done that we, you know, that we don’t really have a good story to tell yet. And it might need like another Ph.D. to come in and really figure it out.
But yeah, we do hope to have most of this published somewhere.
Benjamin Nochimson: Well that’s great. I mean, congrats on the, the publications that you already have. And, you know, fingers crossed for, what comes next. Do you, do you know what you’re going to do, after, you know, after graduation or after August, have you got your next thing lined up?
Zac Colon: Yeah. So I have a postdoc in Cardiff, Wales, at Cardiff University. So yeah, I’m actually going to hop across the pond and sort of experience the European life for a little bit.
Benjamin Nochimson: Nice.
Zac Colon: And that was, sort of fortunate because of my training. They allowed me to go to conference in Venice, Italy. And at the end of it, they allowed like the students to present their work. And one of the PIs there, he, really liked what I was doing, and he was just like, you know, like ‘I’m moving my lab back to the UK.’
Like, ‘If you’re willing to do that, then, like, I’d love to have you there.’ So it’s sort of like, it’s the right place at the right time. And the research he’s doing is really interconnected to what I’m doing now. He’s a really great PI, publishes in really high-impact journals. And I think he’ll really be good for my development, because I do want to hopefully stay in academia, run my own lab at some point.
So I think it’ll be a good steppingstone towards there.
Benjamin Nochimson: For sure! What kind of stuff are they…what kind of stuff are you going to be doing over there?
Zac Colon: Yeah. So he studies mostly astrocytes, which are one of those glial cells that play both a role in the homeostasis of your brain as well as inflammation. And he has many different avenues he goes down. He studies in the context of OCD, studies in the context of aging or even just like normal biology, but like what we’re going to do is we’re going to look at like the specific organelle that these cells have and sort of like what is the function of it first.
And then we’re going to see like, how does that relate to like, the sort of the neuronal circuitry within the striatum. So he really likes to build first on like a basic question, let’s find out and then move from there. So it’s like a really good sort of way of developing, as he says, like sometimes we get like lost and try to ask these complex questions.
But it’s hard to create experiments that answer these complex questions without, like, creating more questions. But mainly we’re going to try and figure out a certain organelle in astrocytes and how it actually functions in both aging and development.
Benjamin Nochimson: Nice. Well, yeah, I mean, I’m really excited on your behalf. It sounds like you’ve got a lot of cool stuff coming down the pipeline in the future. Do you have any advice for future, you know, for future BGE students or really anyone who’s trying to kind of go down the same path that you’ve been going down?
Zac Colon: Yeah. It’s a long journey. There’s going to be a lot of ups and downs. The best advice I ever got is like, when it’s bad, like, sometimes it’s okay to take a break, take a step away from it. But when things are going well, like, that’s the time to push. Like an understanding that like your mental health is important.
You can’t be doing good science if you’re like, sort of anxious about your results or feeling kind of down because of the, sort of like, what’s going on in the world, you know, like you need to always have an open mind and you can’t do that if you’re so, like, fixated on certain problems. And don’t take failure as, like a personal like… don’t say, like, if the experiment fails, it’s not a reflection on you as a person. Like you should be able to understand that science…if we knew everything, then you’re not asking a hard enough question, like part of the science is trying to understand what we don’t know. So there is going to be a lot of failure, but sometimes in that failure is when you find like sort of the little trinket that is the gold that, that is like going to lead you to like a good discovery.
So having an open mind, don’t take failure personally, and really just like, know it’s a long journey, like, celebrate the small wins, set big goals, and don’t be afraid to fail at those big goals.
Benjamin Nochimson: That’s good advice for I think, like anybody, that’s just good life advice. Yeah. Is there anything else that you think is, relevant to what we’ve been talking about, that maybe I didn’t, you know, touch on or didn’t ask, anything about, sort of, you know, your journey in Georgetown or really anything,
Zac Colon: I think maybe, just don’t be afraid to, you know, be yourself and bring in what makes you an individual into the, the workplace. Because sometimes, like, different ways of thinking or different experiences can actually be the connection you need to be able to push yourself into the next question or even just motivate you sometimes when, you know, something fails. And, you know, build a community. Like build a community you want, surround yourself with people who are positive, who are willing to, like, push you as well.
And you know, just like, I don’t know, just keep pushing. Yeah. Life in general is long, and it’s hard. So you’ve got to keep your head up and you just gotta, you know, keep pushing forward.
Benjamin Nochimson: Yeah, well, I do hope that you keep pushing forward. You’ve done a lot of impressive things already, and I really appreciate the time. And, you know, I appreciate that you’re willing to help us with this. This is a great. It’s been great to, you know, get to meet you and learn about what you’ve been up to.
And. Yeah, best of luck with everything that comes next.
Zac Colon: Thanks. Yeah. And I appreciate you guys doing this because I feel like if I had more people who are willing to share their stories, maybe it wouldn’t have taken me as long to figure out like, I wanted to be a Ph.D. scientist and study like the long hours in the lab, rather than like trying to, like, force myself into an avenue that really wasn’t fitting in my personality.
Benjamin Nochimson: Yeah, we’re happy to do it. And we’re. Yeah, again, very happy that you’re willing to share. We really appreciate it.
Zac Colon: Alright. Thank you, man.
Benjamin Nochimson: Alright, well, take it easy, Zac.
Zac Colon: Alright. Bye.
Benjamin Nochimson: Bye.
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