In 8^th grade, Adele wrote an essay on where she pictured herself in 20 years. At her desk on the second floor of the Biomedical Science Building, she smiled and recalled what she wrote.

"Academic faculty at an institution in the Midwest." 

Adele has come full circle in her postgraduate odyssey, completing her PhD in Pharmacology at the Carver College of Medicine in 2014 and returning ten years later to join the faculty. The same attributes that brought her to graduate school here factored into her decision to return. 

“The culture here is one that supports discovery but in a way that is less competitive and more like a family. Other institutions are competitive and cutthroat in comparison. Everyone kept their cards close to the vest. It’s nice to come back to a truly collaborative environment.” 

Even though she grew up in the Midwest and attended a Midwest college, University of Illinois-Urbana/Champaign, Adele was impressed with University of Iowa hospitality. When she was recruited in 2009, she remembers retired faculty John Koland had a pizza party at his home. That experience was one of the reasons she came to Iowa, combined with a Presidential Fellowship which provided a stipend for most of her grad college years. “It made me a hot commodity because I came with money,” she added. 

Adele considered going into bioengineering as an undergraduate but that changed while doing research on strategies to get foreign interfering RNA into cells, a possible approach for depleting expression of a specific gene. When she discovered her experiments only involved targeting an artificial gene, Adele realized she wanted to study the biological function of endogenous genes, not develop a tool for someone else to use. “I wanted to use technology to figure out how biological systems work.” Leveraging her background in biology and training in scientific methodology, she decided to pursue graduate work in pharmacology.  

As a graduate student in the laboratory of Rory Fisher at Iowa, Adele was given the opportunity to study the impact of gene deletion in mice. Her thesis project centered around characterizing altered behaviors in mice lacking the gene for Rgs6, a regulator of neuronal communication. She found that Rgs6 knockout mice have terrible motor coordination, but decreased anxiety. They also consume less alcohol than control mice when given free choice.  In laymen’s terms the mice were chill but incredibly clumsy. The potential clinical implications of this work for alcohol treatment, stimulated her interest in linking gene variation to neuropsychiatric disorders. 

After getting her PhD here, Adele started a postdoctoral job at Vanderbilt University in the laboratory of Dr. Randy Blakely, a leader in the study of neurotransmitter transporters, proteins that determine how long molecules like dopamine and serotonin stay at the synapse. When the lab moved to Florida Atlantic University to spearhead the establishment of a new neuroscience institute, Adele relocated to the sunshine state. As a postdoctoral fellow, her research centered on the study of a mouse with a mutation in the dopamine transporter found in individuals with ADHD, autism, and bipolar disorder.  Disrupting dopamine action in these mice results in several altered behaviors, but, strikingly, the behavioral changes were completely distinct in male vs female mutants. Though Adele stumbled on this observation somewhat by accident, it led to studies that would ultimately conclude that the dopamine system is quite different in each sex. It wasn’t until 2014 that the NIH required sex to be considered as a biological variable in research, an oversight that has limited our understanding of how sex may shape disease. As virtually all psychiatric conditions display sex bias in terms of diagnosis, age of onset, or symptomology, this is an omission she plans to address in her new lab here at Iowa.