Official Story
Megan R. Carey is a Group Leader in the Neuroscience Program at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown in Lisbon, Portugal. She received her PhD in 2005 from the University of California, San Francisco, where her thesis was awarded UCSF's Krevans Distinguished Dissertation Award. After a Helen Hay Whitney Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Carey started her independent laboratory at the Champalimaud. Her lab combines quantitative behavioral analysis, genetics, and physiology to understand how the brain controls learned and coordinated movements. Megan has chaired a number of scientific conferences, including Cosyne and the Cerebellum Gordon Conference, and she serves on the Board of the Society for the Neural Control of Movement and the Board of Reviewing Editors for the journal eLife. She is a member (and former Chair) of the FENS-Kavli Network of Excellence and the Chair-Elect of the ALBA Network for Equity and Diversity in Brain Sciences.
Unofficial Story
Born and raised in Philadelphia, Megan first discovered neuroscience when reading her college coursebook from cover to cover. All the most interesting-sounding courses had the mysterious letters NS&B in front of them, which turned out to mean Neuroscience (and Behavior), a thing she had no idea even existed. She showed up on campus at Wesleyan University unsure whether she'd major in that or physics, her favorite subject in high school. But intro Biology (which she hated in high school, but was a required prerequisite for a Neuroscience major) and intro Physics were scheduled in the same time slot, so she had to choose on the first day. She chose neuroscience and never looked back - to the side, yes, but never back. She walked into the lab of her faculty advisor David Bodznick one day while he was recording from the brain of a skate, heard the magical pop-pop of actual neurons for the first time, and was hooked. He offered her a research position and she spent two blissful summers in his lab at the MBL in Woods Hole, poking skate brains, eating lunch on the dock, and sitting in on fascinating lectures. It still seemed impossible that she could be a real scientist when she grew up, but he told her that he thought she could, so she applied to grad school and got in. She got kind of burned out writing her Master's thesis, though, so on a whim she deferred for a year to volunteer at a guest house in Mexico City, serving breakfast and working in reception and developing a taste for living abroad. Then she moved to San Francisco and spent the next 6.5 years at UCSF questioning her life's choices while she struggled with the slow pace of monkey research and the active obstruction of animal rights activists. She spent more of this time than she expected at City Hall, first testifying against a proposed city-wide shutdown of primate labs, and later, testifying to her illegal arrest by SFPD while protesting the 2003 Iraq war. She eventually decided that she needed to give neuroscience one more chance before she left (to do what though?), and enrolled in the summer Neurobiology course at the MBL, which reinvigorated her love for science and encouraged her to jump fields for her postdoc. After marrying one of her grad school classmates, they moved to Boston for postdocs and were blissfully happy for a year or so, before she had her first child and they started scrambling for everything - enough hours in the day, enough money for childcare, enough faculty positions for both of them. They went on the job market in Sept 2008, just days before the markets crashed and searches were cancelled, but somehow, they both managed to get great offers. Hers was in NYC and his was in Vienna though, and trying to solve that really sucked for a while, until they heard about this new institute that was being built in Lisbon, Portugal. It seemed impossible that they would actually move there, but something magical happened on those recruitment visits and the next thing they knew, they were moving across the ocean with a toddler and a baby, for jobs at a place called the Center for the Unknown. She (mostly) loves her job as a PI, and is surprised and pleased that she has found a career that satisfies her love of science, her international yearnings, and even her inner activist.