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Meet the New Faculty: Staci Bilbo

Researcher explores the links between cognitive ability and early development

 My tendency is always to think 'well, why is this occurring, why did this evolve?'

Your mother prepared you for life in more ways than you may realize.

Not only did she perhaps teach you some manners and how to dress yourself, her nurturing while you were still in the womb set up the structure, function and biochemistry of your brain forevermore.

"You can really change the organism by changing maternal care," says Staci Bilbo, 30, an assistant professor in psychology and neuroscience.

Using rats as models, Bilbo is exploring intriguing links between the immune system and the mind. Animals in her studies are vulnerable to cognitive deficits -- reduced thinking skills -- if exposed to an early infection, even before birth. Given time and good health they might regain most of that cognitive ability, but if they get sick again the mind suffers.

"There's some tradeoff, some shift of resources, between cognition and the immune system," Bilbo says. "The two are linked, for good or for bad."

Bilbo is looking at the problem at multiple levels, from behavior of the organism down to the molecular changes in the brain. "My tendency is always to think ‘well, why is this occurring, why did this evolve?'"

Essentially, the mother primes the infant for the environment it may encounter. Undernourished babies, for example, may struggle with obesity and diabetes later in life because "they are prepared for a world without enough food."

But the link between the mind and immune system is less obvious than that. Bilbo suspects the answers will be found in the actions of the brain's immune system and cells there called microglial cells. Very early in development, these immune system sentinels actively "prune" branches of the developing network of neural cells to help set up the brain's structure. Their other role is to remember infectious challenges and sound the alarm if a challenge occurs. Is it possible they become primed by an early infection to over-respond later in life? Bilbo asks. Does that over-response include some pruning of neurons?

The answers to these questions may help explain why aging differs so widely among adults. Early childhood influences may set the stage for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's later in life, she says.

Bilbo is also concerned about the long-term costs of premature birth, which has increased 30 percent in the United States over the past two decades. A small, weak infant will be more susceptible to these tradeoffs between immunity and cognition that could lead to later neurological issues, including learning and memory issues, Bilbo says. "The more prematurity happens, the more we're going to have to deal with these things."

Bilbo is "more or less" a Texan, having completed high school there and an undergraduate degree at UT Austin. Her Ph.D. was done at Johns Hopkins, where she measured the way hormones and immune system cells changed seasonally in "really adorable little creatures" called Siberian hamsters.

Simply by changing the amount of light the animals received to simulate winter, she could make them lose 30 percent of their body weight, grow thicker, whiter fur, turn off their reproductive systems and crank up their immune systems. "By studying these adaptations to winter conditions, we can try to understand how factors such as energy balance and metabolism influence the immune system, and vice versa," Bilbo says. "But throughout all of that work, I kind of ignored the brain!" she says with a laugh in her Medical Center office.

Her first task is to secure funding for her primary work on the immune response and neural development. But longer term, she says she'd also like to explore the related questions of whether surgery at a very young age affects brain development, and whether a mother's obesity affects neural development.

Bilbo is married to scientist John Mahoney, who is investigating chronic pain therapies for a small pharmaceutical company in the Research Triangle Park. She's also devoted to ashtanga yoga and the Washington Redskins.