Sierra Boyd headed to EPA to Study Neurodevelopmental Diseases

By Chuck Carlson

A chance meeting at a conference led to an opportunity that may well lead to advances in dealing with the growing issue of neurodevelopmental diseases.

“Neurodevelopmental research is lacking,” said Sierra Boyd, who recently defended her Ph.D. dissertation at the Michigan State Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology and, a few days later headed off to North Carolina to work for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

She noted the instance of neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s Disease will reach startling levels by 2040, and research to understand, combat, and perhaps cure, these diseases is vital.

“People are living longer,” she said. “It’s important we continue to study it, and I hope my research continues in that direction.”

At the EPA, Boyd will be a federal post-doc in the lab of Dr. Tim Shafer, himself an alum of the MSU PhmTox program. The lab works to develop methods to screen chemicals for adverse effects on the developing nervous system, thereby reducing the risk of neurodevelopmental diseases resulting from chemical exposure.

The two met last March at the Society of Toxicology Annual Meeting in Nashville, Tenn., where Boyd was making a presentation. “I knew I’d have a position open in the near future, and I saw her poster (at the conference),” Shafer said. “And I asked her if she’d be interested in coming to the EPA.”

Then he laughed.

“And it didn’t hurt where she went to school.”

Boyd was hired to develop new in vitro assays to study important aspects of neurodevelopment, like synaptic plasticity, using different electrophysiological endpoints. She will also work on developing high-throughput 3D culture models as well as using optogenetics to look at specific neuronal cell types and their roles in toxicity. This work will improve the ability of scientists to identify chemicals that may harm the developing brain and contribute to neurodevelopmental disease. “We’re really excited to have her join us,” Shafer said. “The experience she brings in as a Ph.D. working in 3D models fits really well with what we do here.”

Boyd earned her undergraduate degree at MSU, majoring in neuroscience and adding a minor in pharmacology and toxicology. She continued her work in neuroscience, with an emphasis on studying Parkinson’s Disease, while seeking her Ph.D. at MSU’s Grand Rapids campus under the mentorship of Dr. Alison Bernstein.

And just last month she defended her dissertation on the impact of developmental exposures to environmental factors in the onset of Parkinson’s.

“Mine is kind of a niche aspect of it,” she said. “It’s an interesting part that not a lot of people study.”

It also dovetailed nicely with the kind of researcher Shafer was seeking to join his EPA lab.

“It’s been what my lab has been doing for 10 to 15 years,” he said. “We’re trying to find a way to test many chemicals so we can identify the ones that are active biologically and could disrupt nervous system development.”

Boyd begins her research in January in the Research Triangle Park near Raleigh and Durham, N.C., where she will help develop more sophisticated tests that are more accurate, less expensive, and which could become standard testing in the future to identify chemicals with the potential to cause developmental neurotoxicity.

“A lot of people don’t realize that most chemicals out there have not been tested for their potential to cause developmental neurotoxicity,” Shafer said.

“I’m hoping with my work I can come up with new ways we can screen better for neurodevelopmental diseases. There’s not a lot of research going into that right now,” she said. “It’s interesting. Only 5 percent of cases are due to genetics, and 95 percent of Parkinson’s is due to environmental factors.”