Bianca Jones Marlin

Bianca Jones Marlin is an American neuroscientist and Simons Society Junior Fellow working at the Zuckerman Institute at Columbia University in New York City. Marlin currently studies the epigenetic mechanisms that enable trauma to be passed transgenerationally. Marlin's graduate work uncovered the fundamental role of oxytocin in mother parental behavior and she was awarded the Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience for Outstanding Ph.D. thesis as well as the STAT Wunderkinds Award for her groundbreaking findings.

Bianca Jones Marlin
Born
Queens, NY
NationalityAmerican
Alma materB.A. / B.S. St. John's University, Ph.D. New York University Medical School, Postdoctoral Fellowship Columbia University
Known forRole of neuropeptide oxytocin in maternal behavior
Awards2017 Stat Wunderkinds Award, 2017 Simon Foundation Society of Fellows - Junior Fellow, 2016 Donald B. Lindsley Prize, 2016 Sackler Dissertation Prize
Scientific career
FieldsNeuroscience
InstitutionsColumbia University
Websitewww.biancajonesmarlin.com

Early life and education

Marlin grew up in Central Islip, Long Island with a unique family structure that influenced her scientific career trajectory significantly.[1] Marlin's biological parents, whom she lived with, were also the foster parents of many other children.[2] Growing up with both biological and non-biological brothers and sisters piqued Marlin's interest in genetics at a very early age.[2] Listening to difficult stories from her non-biological brothers and sisters, stories of their lives prior to becoming a part of Marlin's family, was pivotal in developing her interest in how negative parental relationships impact a child.[3]

Marlin excelled in her studies from an early age. Her excellent high school grades enabled her to get a scholarship to financially support her first semester of college at St. John's University.[4] While at St. John's University, she pursued a dual degree in biology and adolescent education and was actively involved in student leadership and research.[4] Her choice to pursue adolescent education stemmed from her determination to go back to her high school and provide a superior education to future students compared to the one she received.[5] In addition to further developing her passion for education, Marlin participated in on-campus research and in two summer research programs, one at Vanderbilt University and a following at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[6]  At MIT, Marlin worked under the mentorship of Dr. Martha Constantine Paton and won an award for her research poster at the end of the summer.[4] While presenting her research poster at MIT, the dean from the New York University School of Medicine urged her to consider applying for graduate school at NYU.[6] Despite these experiences, Marlin was still set on becoming a teacher.[1] Upon graduation, Marlin was honored with the Distinguished Student Leader Award for her service as the President of the student government and then pursued a job back in New York City as an AP Biology Teacher.[1] She quickly realized that she wanted to continue learning and applied for graduate programs, eventually deciding to matriculate into the New York University School of Medicine Graduate Program in Biology and Physiology.[4] After 5 rotations, Marlin joined the lab of Dr. Robert Froemke, a new principal investigator at the time.[6] Froemke was actually so new that Marlin helped unpack boxes of equipment during her rotation and even bought some of her own lab materials for her rotation experiment.[6] Despite a rocky start, Marlin had a very successful graduate experience.[6]

Parental behavior and Oxytocin

Marlin's work centered around exploring the role of oxytocin, often known as the "love hormone", in maternal behavior.[6] On her way to elucidating the biological underpinnings of maternal behavior, Marlin first explored auditory cortex plasticity during critical periods of brain development.[7] She published a paper in 2011 describing the importance of excitatory-inhibitory balance in determining the duration of the critical period plasticity for auditory cortical frequency tuning, since after birth the auditory cortex is not yet tuned.[7] This work laid the foundation for Marlin to be able to explore how oxytocin shapes social cognition and modifies neural circuits to enable mothers to retrieve pups when they emit ultrasonic stress calls.[8] Typically, mothers (or dams) respond to pup calls while virgin females do not, suggesting some sort of plasticity in the auditory cortex takes place to enable mothers to respond to their pups.[8] Marlin hypothesized that this plasticity int h auditory cortex was due to oxytocin since virgins can begin to respond to pup calls when administered oxytocin.[8] In fact, Marlin found that oxytocin receptors were more highly expressed in the left auditory cortex than the right, suggesting a pre-existing neural circuit specialized to process social information.[8] They further found that oxytocin sensitized the auditory neural circuits in the left auditory cortex by disinhibiting auditory cortex neurons and long term change in excitatory-inhibitory balance in the auditory cortex.[8] The increased balance accounted for the stable spike-timing precision that is observed in dams but not virgins allowing mothers, or oxytocin exposed virgins, to reliably respond to pup calls.[8]

Marlin's findings were groundbreaking, not only showing functional lateralization of the mammalian brain but also a dedicated neural circuit, dependent on oxytocin, for social behaviors and adaptation.[8] Her discovery was highlighted in various press releases and articles such as National Geographic and Science Magazine, and it got to the top 100 Stories of 2015.[9]

Career and research

After a successful graduate degree at NYU, Marlin was offered a faculty position, a rare offer for someone straight out of graduate school.[6] However, Marlin was not ready to stop learning just yet. She pursued postdoctoral work at Columbia University under the mentorship of Nobel Laureate, Dr. Richard Axel.[6]

In Axel's lab, Marlin pursued her second major scientific interest; how trauma is transgenerationally passed to offspring through epigenetic mechanisms.[2] For example, Marlin and her team will establish a fear memory in adult mice by pairing a specific odor with a shock such that, after learning, presentation of this odor elicits freezing behavior.[2] In their preliminary results, Marlin and her colleagues have found that the offspring of these adult mice also seem to avoid this odor, even if they have never experienced this odor being paired with a shock.[2] Marlin hypothesizes that the offspring inherit epigenetic modifications in their DNA that allow them to be wary of the odor.[2] By looking for changes in the biology of the adult mice that were fear conditioned, they have found that mice that undergo fear conditioning have more cells that specifically express the fear conditioned odor receptor.[2] In Marlin's lab, which she will be starting at Columbia University,[10] she will continue to explore if these cells are also modified in the offspring, and if so, what epigenetic mechanism underlies this transgenerational genetic change.[2] In addition, Marlin's lab will focus on how sperm cells can carry genetic memories such that father's can pass on the memory of trauma to offspring.[2]

In addition to her research, Marlin serves as the incoming chair for the Society for Neuroscience Trainee Advisory Committee, as well as a member of the Online Program Steering Committee and the Leadership Development Program Advisory Group.[11] Marlin is also actively involved in educating both her local and online communities. She has been featured on several podcasts and at local science communication initiatives, such as The Story Collider, where she brings her research findings into the public domain making science accessible to a general audience.[3][12] Marlin also helps coordinate the “Growing Up in Science” seminar series at Columbia University, meant to highlight the true story behind a scientists’ glowing CV.[13]

Oxytocin and maternal behavior

Following Marlin's groundbreaking discoveries regarding the role of oxytocin in mediating pup retrieval behavior, Marlin conducted further work with her colleagues in the Froemke Lab exploring oxytocin's biological role on social cognition.[14] First, Marlin and her colleagues developed oxytocin specific antibodies and were able to identify a distributed network of brain regions highly enriched in oxytocin and implicated in parental behaviors in female mice.[15] Narrowing in on the specific cellular locations of these receptors using electron microscopy, they found that oxytocin receptors are expressed mainly at synapses but also along axons and on glial cell processes.[15] To understand what oxytocin was doing in these circuits, they administered oxytocin and found that overall it reduced synaptic inhibition allowing for plasticity.[15] These results suggest a role for oxytocin in enabling learning of maternal behaviors during parenthood.[15] Marlin and her colleagues followed up this study by looking at the brain region responsible for the release of oxytocin, the paraventricular nucleus (PVN).[16] Using in vivo electrophysiology to record from PVN neurons during maternal care behavior and found that social interaction activated oxytocin positive neurons in the PVN and further they found that these neurons gated cortical plasticity in response to pup calls.[16] Overall, Marlin's work has given the field tremendous insight into the role of oxytocin in neuromodulation and neuroplasticity related to social parenting behavior.[17]

Awards and honors
  • 2017 Stat Wunderkinds Award[18]
  • 2017 Simon Foundation Society of Fellows - Junior Fellow[19]
  • 2016 Donald B. Lindsley Prize[20]
  • 2016 Sackler Dissertation Prize[21]

Selected press
  • Fox News - Fox5 “What’s on Your Mind - Emotions and Our Brains”[22]
  • American Museum of Natural History - SciCafe  “The Science of Love with Bianca Jones Marlin”[23]
  • Featured on Podcasts: Uptown Radio - Parenting Through Oxytocin,[12] You're the expert podcast - "What you inherit from your parents",[24] Science Friday Podcast “Animal Moms: From Lion to Mouse”[25]
  • Vanny et al. STEM in Style Series[26]
  • The Story Collider - featured speaker “Pregnancy: Stories about the science of having a baby”[27] and  "Its Because she’s Black"[3]
  • Featured in National Geographic  “Is Maternal Instinct Only for Moms? Here’s the Science”[28] and "Great Energy Challenge"[29]
  • Featured in the Discovery Magazine - "How Oxytocin Changes Behavior"[30]
  • Features in the Los Angeles Time - "Hormone Oxytocin Jump Starts Maternal Behavior"[31]
  • NIH Directors Blog - Lab TV: Curious About a Mother's Bond[32]

Publications
  • The Next 50 Years of Neuroscience. Altimus CM, Marlin BJ, Charalambakis NE, Colón-Rodriquez A, Glover EJ, Izbicki P, Johnson A, Lourenco MV, Makinson RA, McQuail J, Obeso I, Padilla-Coreano N, Wells MF; for Training Advisory Committee. J Neurosci. 2020 Jan 2;40(1):101-106. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0744-19.2019. PMID 31896564[33]
  • Oxytocin modulation of neural circuits for social behavior. Marlin BJ, Froemke RC. Dev Neurobiol. 2017 Feb;77(2):169-189. doi: 10.1002/dneu.22452. Epub 2016 Oct 4. Review.PMID 27626613[17]
  • A Distributed Network for Social Cognition Enriched for Oxytocin Receptors. Mitre M, Marlin BJ, Schiavo JK, Morina E, Norden SE, Hackett TA, Aoki CJ, Chao MV, Froemke RC. J Neurosci. 2016 Feb 24;36(8):2517-35. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2409-15.2016. PMID 26911697[34]
  • Oxytocin enables maternal behaviour by balancing cortical inhibition. Marlin BJ, Mitre M, D'amour JA, Chao MV, Froemke RC. Nature. 2015 Apr 23;520(7548):499-504. doi: 10.1038/nature14402. Epub 2015 Apr 15. PMID 25874674[8]

References
  1. "The Story Collider – Bianca Jones Marlin: It's Because She's Black – 11:59". radiopublic.com. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  2. "Five Questions for Mother's Day with Neuroscientist Bianca Jones Marlin". Columbia University Irving Medical Center. 2018-05-11. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  3. "Bianca Jones Marlin: It's Because She's Black". The Story Collider. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  4. "Growing up in science". www.cns.nyu.edu. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  5. "Upcoming Events". Bianca Jones Marlin, Ph.D. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  6. "Dr. Bianca Jones Marlin". Stories of WiN. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  7. Froemke, Robert C.; Jones, Bianca J. (November 2011). "Development of auditory cortical synaptic receptive fields". Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews. 35 (10): 2105–2113. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2011.02.006. ISSN 1873-7528. PMC 3133871. PMID 21329722.
  8. Marlin, Bianca J.; Mitre, Mariela; D'amour, James A.; Chao, Moses V.; Froemke, Robert C. (2015-04-23). "Oxytocin enables maternal behaviour by balancing cortical inhibition". Nature. 520 (7548): 499–504. Bibcode:2015Natur.520..499M. doi:10.1038/nature14402. ISSN 1476-4687. PMC 4409554. PMID 25874674.
  9. "SciCafe: Science of Love with Bianca Jones Marlin". American Natural History Museum. Retrieved April 13, 2020.
  10. "5 Questions with Columbia Neuroscientist Bianca Jones Marlin". Cool NYC Events. 2020-02-28. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  11. "Building Community Through Service: Bianca Jones Marlin on Volunteer Leadership". neuronline.sfn.org. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  12. "Press". Bianca Jones Marlin, Ph.D. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  13. "Growing Up in Science". Zuckerman Institute - Columbia University. Retrieved April 13, 2020.
  14. pubmeddev. "Error encountered - PubMed - NCBI". www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  15. Mitre, Mariela; Marlin, Bianca J.; Schiavo, Jennifer K.; Morina, Egzona; Norden, Samantha E.; Hackett, Troy A.; Aoki, Chiye J.; Chao, Moses V.; Froemke, Robert C. (2016-02-24). "A Distributed Network for Social Cognition Enriched for Oxytocin Receptors". The Journal of Neuroscience. 36 (8): 2517–2535. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2409-15.2016. ISSN 0270-6474. PMC 4764667. PMID 26911697.
  16. Carcea, Ioana; Caraballo, Naomi López; Marlin, Bianca J.; Ooyama, Rumi; Navarro, Joyce M. Mendoza; Opendak, Maya; Diaz, Veronica E.; Schuster, Luisa; Torres, Maria I. Alvarado; Lethin, Harper; Ramos, Daniel (2019-11-17). "Oxytocin Neurons Enable Social Transmission of Maternal Behavior". bioRxiv: 845495. doi:10.1101/845495.
  17. Marlin, Bianca J.; Froemke, Robert C. (February 2017). "Oxytocin modulation of neural circuits for social behavior". Developmental Neurobiology. 77 (2): 169–189. doi:10.1002/dneu.22452. ISSN 1932-846X. PMID 27626613.
  18. "Meet the 2017 STAT Wunderkinds". STAT. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  19. "Bianca Jones Marlin". Simons Foundation. 2017-08-14. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  20. "Bianca Jones Marlin | The Grass Foundation". www.grassfoundation.org. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  21. "Skirball Institute of Biomolecular Medicine News & Awards". NYU Langone Health. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  22. Answering questions about the brain, retrieved 2020-04-14
  23. Science of Love with Bianca Jones Marlin – AMNH SciCafe, retrieved 2020-04-14
  24. What You Inherit From Your Parents, retrieved 2020-04-14
  25. "Bianca Jones Marlin". Science Friday. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  26. "STEM IN STYLE SERIES: EPISODE V". Vanny et al. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  27. "Pregnancy: Stories about the science of having a baby". The Story Collider. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  28. "Is Maternal Instinct Only for Moms? Here's the Science". National Geographic News. 2018-05-09. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  29. "Great Energy Challenge". Environment. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  30. "How Oxytocin Changes Behavior". Discover Magazine. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  31. "Hormone oxytocin jump-starts maternal behavior". Los Angeles Times. 2015-04-16. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  32. "LabTV: Curious About a Mother's Bond". NIH Director's Blog. 2015-08-25. Retrieved 2020-04-14.
  33. Altimus, Cara M.; Marlin, Bianca Jones; Charalambakis, Naomi Ekavi; Colón-Rodriquez, Alexandra; Glover, Elizabeth J.; Izbicki, Patricia; Johnson, Anthony; Lourenco, Mychael V.; Makinson, Ryan A.; McQuail, Joseph; Obeso, Ignacio (2020-01-02). "The Next 50 Years of Neuroscience". The Journal of Neuroscience. 40 (1): 101–106. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0744-19.2019. ISSN 1529-2401. PMC 6939479. PMID 31896564.
  34. Mitre, Mariela; Marlin, Bianca J.; Schiavo, Jennifer K.; Morina, Egzona; Norden, Samantha E.; Hackett, Troy A.; Aoki, Chiye J.; Chao, Moses V.; Froemke, Robert C. (2016-02-24). "A Distributed Network for Social Cognition Enriched for Oxytocin Receptors". The Journal of Neuroscience. 36 (8): 2517–2535. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2409-15.2016. ISSN 1529-2401. PMC 4764667. PMID 26911697.
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