Dr. Tara Ghazi, PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience - Psychology | Chief Operating Officer at MALCOVA

In this episode, we discuss Tara’s inspiring, non-traditional path to pursuing her undergraduate and graduate degrees in cognitive neuroscience, how she translated her doctoral training and her extensive professional experience to co-found a startup focusing on medical device development for breast cancer, and her take on the importance of stepping outside of your comfort zone and exposing yourself to new ideas and experiences to help broaden your outlook and discover your own path.

Hosted by Brooklyn Arroyo

To connect with Tara and to learn more about her story, visit her page on the PHutures #100AlumniVoices Project website.

Transcript

Brooklyn Arroyo

Hello I'm co-host Brooklyn Arroyo and this is 100 Alumni Voices podcast, stories that inspire, where we explore the personal and professional journeys of a diverse group of 100 doctoral alumni from Johns Hopkins University. Today we're joined by Tara Ghazi, PhD in cognitive neuroscience. Welcome to PHutures Podcast. How are you today?

Tara Ghazi

I’m well. Thank you very much, Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Yeah, I'm really excited to be able to work with you. My big focus in my academic experience is cognitive science and neuroscience. So, I'm really interested to hear sort of your experience into into your PhD and what motivated you to go down that path.

Tara Ghazi

Yeah, definitely. So, my undergraduate degree is in cognitive science, but my my own journey it actually was not so linear in getting to my educational path. So, I I graduated high school in 1998 and right out of high school I actually went to university, but in the first year had a personal health situation that took me out of it and from there I ended up going down really a professional path for quite some time. And when I had first embarked, you know, on a college journey, I didn't have a strong direction then out of high school. I didn't have a lot of examples in my life. I I was the the first woman in my family. I was raised by a single mother, two sisters, the first one to be pursuing college. So, academia was not a part of my personal history in any way. And really for a while, career wise, I was just simply driven by making a living, trying to, you know, make ends meet, make a life. But I found myself being really really proficient in areas that required analytical and detail-oriented skills, and I always had something of a knack and an interest in people. So, I I had a let's say strong EQ, understood how to communicate well with people how to interact with them and was very curious about people's life experiences. And my so in my in my personal life and in my professional life on this career path, I was really trying to seek and find a strong calling, really find my own interest. And this is pretty common, I think with many people, regardless of if they go to college right out of high school, that there is a period of time where you're getting to know yourself and you're trying to find out what matters most to you in your life and what you really want to be pursuing. And for me, when I found a community of people who really resonated with my own aims, it was something of a spark and a revelation. Among this community of people, I connected with them because I in my 20s was strongly into rock climbing and I found through that sport fellow lovers of nature, people who were really concerned about the environment about doing good in this world, having some kind of positive impact. And in that group, I met people who were pursuing their own graduate studies in fields including science, and it exposed me for the first time in my life to an example of, OK, this is 1 something possible. And they're speaking my language, so to speak. I kind of found my tribe, and I found that the things I was very curious about, they were, you have to be about people, but they were similarly curious and exploring things. And so that for me was a spark and an example that I needed to pursue this path. They gave me the confidence to completely put a pause in my career, remove this, stop my professional life and return to being student at a time when most people are, you know, well passed that phase and are really just working on being a productive citizen and making an income. So, I focused on my return to completing my undergraduate education. And I I did that through the path of initially Community College, which is really the only possible way I worked at full time career path. I was doing many side gigs trying to kind of find my calling and I pursued night classes for a period of time. I was really good student, but it was really it took some time for me to figure out I. I struggled for a while. Which scientific path? I knew it was going to be science and it was hard for me to just I have a very strong love of of the natural world and just was curious about a lot of things. When I discovered I did my undergraduate at at UC Berkeley in California, and when I was exploring and thinking about, OK, where might I transfer and what kind of programs do I want to go into for my undergraduate degree? At Berkeley in particular, their cognitive science program is very holistic and incorporates, like many undergraduate cognitive science programs, to not just neuroscience and maybe some psychology, but anthropology, philosophy, linguistics, and maybe some of the social sciences. And at Berkeley computer science. And so that that diverse approach to studying a subject was really exciting to me because it was many different things that could be explored, about which all seemed fascinating and amazing, bound by this common theme of cognition. And so that's, that's where I dove in and during my undergraduate education there, I took a cognitive neuroscience course and that course for me was just eye opening. It was like this, OK, this is really where it's at. This complete bridge for me and the the really sentimental biology of the brain along with this higher-level understanding of human cognition, that really was the spark, so that I thought that that's definitely what I'm pursuing. So that that helped set my focus.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Wow, yeah. And like I said, I also am in studying a lot of the subject area and it really is cognitive science, especially is such a multifaceted area of study and I always appreciated that you kind of learn a little bit about things that we don't usually have any ties to one another. And and I really appreciate being able to connect the dots in those ways. And do you feel that you experienced and you learned, and I'm sure you did, but I would love for you to highlight on areas that you saw correlations to things that you didn't necessarily think were related at all within your studies and within your research?

Tara Ghazi

For me, things that were surprising that I wouldn't have expected when you on starting my cognitive education and cognitive science really was the the side of it that you know, in some of my anthropology courses, for instance, I was able to study the evolution of the human brain and do comparative species analysis. So, I think it was very eye opening in a way it had not been before to think of humans in the context of being another species on this planet. You know, that's just one other animal. And how we can draw parallels and differences to other organisms that we would think are vastly different from humans and to find common threads. I think that was very eye opening to me and very unexpected. Something else that I computer science was very interesting and I had not before having taken courses in this really understood how much we come to think about human cognition in the lens of what we learn from computers. It is not the case when we, you know that computer science is modeled based on human thinking; however, it is a common way for us to try to in this day and age, understand cognition a bit more and what's going on in the brain by speaking of it in terms that are very much based in computer science. And it's not unlike, apparently, what we have done at other stages of of history, rewind, you know, a couple 100 years and that people were speaking of human thought in in ways that were appropriate for what was understood at the time and relevant.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Definitely that I definitely agree with that second point. That was some of the most, not surprising that the word I'm thinking of is more just shocking in a way that I didn't always associate thought, and I think a lot of people don't just the way that we're taught how to think about cognition is somewhat fluffy science. It's it's often pushed to pseudosciences. It's sometimes thought, even not of as like true science, because in a lot of ways it's hard to quantify things like thought and relating it to computer science has been really interesting. And thinking about how it is we even think and how our brains work. And I just want to highlight back to something you talked about in the beginning that relates to sort of the idea of Anthropology and human thoughts and the impacts that has on our minds. And you mentioned how you didn't necessarily always see someone around you who was going out and wanting to be a part of college and you were the first one around you. And I know personally and and just from my life experiences that is probably one of the hardest things you can do in in trying to achieve something, and oftentimes people don't realize that it takes a lot of work to do something when you haven't seen it be done. And what advice would you have for someone who feels like they want to go achieve something, but they're not really sure if that's for them or if it's meant to be for them, if they can even achieve this?

Tara Ghazi

It's one of the the really big challenges is to try and discover something that you have no clue exists out there, right and that's a huge thing that we do is we look to the people around us and we look to what's available in our environment. And sometimes there are limitations on what you can actually gain exposure to that or just they are what they are for the time being. And so, I think it is it is OK to try and explore within your environment and to try and seek new information and experiment with the places where you get information and maybe the people you try to interact with. I think it's a it it sometimes can require you to be brave and do things that are uncomfortable and to put yourself in positions that maybe are not the automatic part of the routine. So, if you have friends circles or groups of people, you know that you can easily interact with, sometimes it's about trying to branch out on your own without that, you know, without a friend to try something new and see if you hear something new, are exposed to something new. I think that's a really big part of it is that you have to get new information from sources and try to limit the influence that you have or that the influence upon you of the information you already have. So maybe the current peer group is not pursuing the thing that's ultimately the the most engaging thing for you. I think that can be a common theme. It's great when you land with a group of people that are interested in the same stuff and you're speaking the same language, so to speak, but it can be very limiting if you feel that it's not OK to waste. This doesn't quite feel right for me, or this isn't giving me the answers that I'd hoped. So, it I getting out into different situations that can be uncomfortable is amazing. If one has the resources traveling within the states or out of the country is an incredible opportunity because it's often uncomfortable, but you will certainly be exposed to new situations, new types of people, and you'll have to rise to the occasion and to navigate that discomfort. And that can be eye opening. So, I think finding means to explore, you know, with whatever resources that you have whatever time you have and availability. But yeah, put yourself out there. I think also you know just at the the first point that you were talking about some viewing cognition as a soft science, that is, I think, an example of how different the influences of voices can be when you are around certain groups that are not highly informed about the field that you're interested in. It's been I I cannot recall in all of my time during my PhD or in during my undergrad pursuing cognitive science, I don't think I was ever exposed to anybody who thought cognitive science or cognition was a soft-science, so it's it's an indicator of how different opinions can be depending on the perspective of those giving them and how important it is to listen to opinions and try to seek them out from people with different backgrounds and different places because human cognition, the way we think about, interact with our world, is a really, really critical field today, and cognitive science, as you know, is really at the foundation of artificial intelligence. And that's a pretty huge right now. All issues related to AI moving forward and cognitive science as a field, one could say, actually it was its origins lie in linguistics and computer science in the 70s as a formalized field, so it was initially studied and has its roots in just the fundamental scientific practice. So yeah, don't be listening to haters.

Brooklyn Arroyo

No, definitely. And I think that you brought up a good point about, it's just important to further educate people, whether that be the general public or everyone about not just cognitive science, but a lot of different scientific fields and growing fields have progressed within the past 5-10 years significantly, and the progression hasn't necessarily trickled down to the general public yet. And so, I think we see that a lot with things like genetics, with vaccines, with general public health, with cognitive science, and that's what makes it easy for misconceptions to take place and misunderstandings of what's actually happened happening in the scientific world. And so yeah, I definitely think that you you bring up a good point about just it's good to diversify what people know and and to spread out those that knowledge, and especially good for people who are in places that aren't necessarily surrounded by scholars to go become a scholar. So, you can go back and share your knowledge with everybody else. So yeah, I definitely think I just I want to know because I am researching the same sort of subject area and I feel that I relate to you in the sense that you were drawn to it because you noticed sort of an inclination towards human nature and an understanding or an interest and I feel that a lot of my environment and personal identities influenced my interest in how we impact one another and how we talk to one another and how our environments can impact the way we think. And so do you feel that the the life you lived and grew up in and the identities you hold have influenced the the path and the science that you now study?

Tara Ghazi

Very much so. So, one of the things that I opened with is talking about my own pathway to get back to higher education and one thing that is very clear and understood and and to think about is regardless of if your education is formal or not, humans are always learning. That is what we do by we go through, you know, our childhood, we're actively taking in information. We're learning very much from the environment around us and the people around us. We're taking those signals and those cues very strongly. Our formal education, you know, we get judged on that, right. And there's certain kind of ideals that we have to to meet and whatnot. But you know, you get past your formal education, you go out in the world and you continue to do that. And many of the experiences that I had meeting a diverse range of people, seeing the impacts of lifestyle choices, of difficult childhood and challenges early in life, how that can affect trajectories of life and what people are capable of focusing on these things very much made an impact on me and shaped, particularly in my own research, the way that I tried to study that particular question. And, more specifically, what I mean by that is it really highlighted for me that there is not always one very simple answer or reason for people to think or act in a particular way, that often there can be multiple causes that relate in particular to their own experience, their own environment. And some of those are permanent and unchanging, other of those may be temporary and contextual, but the simplest explanation is not always really capturing the most broad understanding. And so, these things it's kind of an abstract and big picture way to talk about it, but really shape shape the way that you know I perceive questions. The other thing that you know resonates very loudly with me, of course, is I returned to my education, you know, as I mentioned, after a a longer period in industry and kind of the professional world at a time when you know what we come to understand now the brain is fully developed. Most people don't really even think about the brain as continuing to develop as it is well into your 20s and that doesn't slow down until your much later 20s. And so, the young adult brain, you know, in your late teens and throughout your 20s, it operates a little bit differently than the more developed and kind of stable adult brain that's with us into later life and then it changes again in aging. And so, one of the things that I was also very interested in were those changes over time because understanding the way that people think and understanding cognition, say at the age of 22 or 23 can be different from the cognition at the age of say, 45 versus at the age of 85. And these things are pretty important to understand that there is not one single static way of things for a single person in their own life you know, let alone for different people with different experiences. So, these are things that I think are important to think about. I I had studied sex and gender differences and similarities during my PhD, and was very interested in how much people focus on differences, but really the the vast majority of things are about similarities, and when you look at the biological sex, mostly biological males’ and biological females’ cognition is incredibly much the same, and when we understand that from scientific perspective, then you can look separately at the influences of gender and gender identity and roles in society and how those that can have separate impacts on cognition as people attempt to understand the science. So, these are different ways that my own identity and being in touch with that can inform the questions you know that I was interested in asking in the PhD to pursue.

Brooklyn Arroyo

And so, the work that you're doing now, has it been a continuation of your research of your academic experience within academia or have you stepped back into industry? What does the work that you're doing now look like?

Tara Ghazi

Yeah, thanks for asking. So, because of my unique professional experience kind of coming and being extensive before the return to education, I I was quite adept and very confident, let's say in industry. And so right now, professionally is when I, when I defended my PhD and finished, I actually stepped immediately back into industry and I'm the co-founder of a startup company. And so, with my co-founder, yeah, we we focus on medical device development that's specifically targeted at resolving issues in breast cancer. Yeah, so it's it is not on the face, doesn't seem to be the most obvious translation, but I'll give you a little bit of explanation on this that if you are being imaged for potential cancer, you're going to go and use the medical device and then a radiologist is going to view the images that come out of that and that radiologist, their cognition, their viewing of this has an impact on whether you may have a a diagnosis that can, you know, impact your health outcome. And so, my, what I developed and worked on during my PhD helps inform how a device can be designed to better work with the human the radiologist who needs to interface with that to provide patients better care. So that plus you know most PhDs will at some point, unless you're in the humanities, you'll be working with the data and so general skills of data science broadly are developed. You can't avoid them. They're excellent. And they translate to a pretty broad range of things. So, my position right now because I had much experience in the professional world and in the business realm, I'm able to couple that with the scientific skills and expertise that I developed during my PhD to try and do some good for Women's Health broadly.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Wow, well congrats to you on your startup and and it it sounds like just really important work that you're doing on the influence of Women's Health on public health and in some, especially something as important as breast cancer and and being able to support a healthier system within that is just really amazing and and really inspiring. And so, if there is a plan for you, what would the next phase of your career look like? And what would that what do you hope that that looks like?

Tara Ghazi

So, this this phase right now I think and hope will be a path that I'm on for a number of years. There is a lot of work to be done and it's a relatively substantial path ahead that's clearly defined, but something that is important to me is to offer mentorship and share story where I can, because those things were really critical for me on my journey to get to the present, so I do hope to be engaged in any kind of way that I can in a supportive role with others. So, for instance, in our company, we have internships and that's a direct opportunity to try and help others at earlier stages in their paths. Just try something out and find out you know is it an interesting path? Are you? Do you like the skills that you have to apply? Is that the right work environment for you? You have. There's only so much information one can get by listening to the stories of others, which is really huge to understand what's out there, but then you really have to just get out and try things and things like paid internships are an excellent way to do that, because you get to have some real experience and see what works for you so.

Brooklyn Arroyo

Definitely. So, I find that inspiring because I love myself an internship opportunity and would love to work with you in the future. But sort of leading into our grand finale of each interview is what inspires you right now?

Tara Ghazi

This will be another aspect of my identity, but I am I'm a parent. I'm a mother of a very little one, and I find it my little one is 3 ½ years old and it is really fascinating to watch cognitive development at this age, so I think it's very amazing to watch the understanding unfold, to watch personality really shine through the the things that we can study in adults, and I had never previously really had an interest in the developmental side of things that it's very inspiring to see the just joy and need to learn and put hands on everything and cause a lot of trouble. So, I find that very inspiring, but in particular, all of us have, you know, our challenging days. It is, it is really inspiring just to see a constant ball of energy and you know, curiosity and positivity abounding on a daily basis, so yeah, well, I'll say that that's that. I hope that's many mothers’ answers in some kind of way, but yeah, for me it's on the science side of things, particularly inspiring.

Brooklyn Arroyo

No, it it definitely is. And the vast majority of these interviews, that's usually how it goes. They mention their children because there there is something inspiring about the crazy Littles, so thank you again for for coming onto the PHutures Podcast and speaking with me today and I know that the audience will will learn so much from all you've had to share.