Official Story
Chiye majored in biology at Barnard College, the women's college of Columbia University. During the summer of her junior and senior year, she volunteered in the lab of Jonathan Winson at Rockefeller University, where she was introduced to physiological recordings of the hippocampus of awake and sleeping animals. A week after graduation, she began working as the sole research technician to Jonathan Winson. The next year, she was admitted to Rockefeller's PhD program. It took six years to earn a PhD, working in Phil Siekevitz's laboratory of cell biology and investigating the neurochemical basis of the critical period for visual cortical plasticity. She did a 3-year post-doctoral training in the laboratory of Virginia Pickel at Cornell University Medical College, where she learned electron microscopy and, paradoxically, about non-synaptic modes of neuronal communication. She became a research assistant professor there, and after two years, got the job at the CNS. It was the only place to which she applied for a faculty job. She was promoted to full professor in 2004.
Unofficial Story
Chiye was born in East LA, grew up there, then in Tokyo and New York. She lost/gained and regained her native tongue, which led her to wonder about brain plasticity. Most recently, after witnessing profound changes upon her children during adolescence, she has started studying plasticity of adolescent brains. Graduate school educated Chiye in many topics that were not on official playbook. She witnessed half of her cell biology department burn up in flames and with it, see young scientists' careers go down the drain. As she was pushing to finish her last set of experiments, her experiments stopped working. For those 6 months, she seriously doubted if she would ever graduate. She learned that famous, highly accomplished scientists are not necessarily the best mentors. She witnessed another highly accomplished, moral and compassionate scientist (her PhD adviser) lose to others, due to an unspoken handicap. She saw a lab get turned upside down due to suspected fraudulence and another neuroscientist's career become torn up by animal rights activists. Her female role models were unmarried and childless. For the job interview at the CNS, she carefully prepared her declaration speech about how she intended to have children (eventually), and that this was only fair, seeing how the male professors at the CNS were having children. This was met with a 'Oh, sure,' and a smile. On the other hand, she has seen female post-docs and students from her lab take alternative paths, due to incompatibility with motherhood. Chiye has faced many rejections of manuscripts and many, many declines of grant proposals, but feels lucky to have had just enough of them accepted at the right time to enable her to continue pursuing her passion. The most miraculous and joyous moments revolved parenthood but the most heart-wrenching moments that made her feel the most vulnerable and challenged also revolved parenthood. In those difficult times, the career of science and life around the lab provided the steady source of creativity, energy and joy. Conversely, when grants were denied and papers were rejected, the steady source of love and support from the family kept her going. People ask her how one should balance work with life. Chiye's advice is: listen to your gut feelings, especially about bad mentors and scientific questions, seek and promote physically and mentally healthy work environments, realize that no matter how passionate you are about work, it needs to be balanced with additional personal needs, so set aside time for them.