MCO graduate student Ethan Glantz is motivated by curiosity and a desire to make discoveries. He was recently awarded an NIH F31 fellowship, also known as the Ruth L. Kirschstein Predoctoral Individual National Research Service Award. It supports graduate students who have the potential to eventually start their own labs.
“Ethan likes working on problems that are generally interesting to any human — where does the feeling of sleepiness come from, how is it possible to store a memory for many decades, etc,” says Harvard Medical School professor and Glantz’s advisor Dragana Rogulja. “He likes discussing these problems from both a philosophical and experimental perspective, and does not shy away from using new approaches.”
Despite currently being a graduate student at Harvard, Glantz says he has never been “a good student” in the traditional sense. He failed multiple classes at Brandeis, and though he joined a neuroscience lab as an undergraduate, his attempt at a thesis project was “such a mess” that the thesis defense was canceled at the last minute. Glantz did not let these early failures deter him from pursuing research. However, he knew he needed more experience researching before he could go on to graduate school.
After graduating, Glantz found a position as a research associate in Michael Crickmore’s lab at Harvard Medical School, where Glantz stayed on for three years. Crickmore’s research focuses on molecular, cellular, and circuit level mechanisms underlying motivational states. One of Glantz’s projects delved into the sex drive and how it starts. “Pretty much all of our basic motivated drives and behaviors are there from the time we’re born, and that’s true for almost all of the animal kingdom,” Glantz explains. “But sexual behaviors, for whatever reason, are delayed.”
To understand how the new drive comes online, Glantz conducted experiments in fruit flies “What people thought was that these circuits just weren’t wired up yet,” he says. However, he and his colleagues found that the circuits governing sex drive were present and functional prior to the emergence of sexual behavior .
For an individual project in the Crickmore Lab, Glantz looked into how learning and memory shape the sexual behavior circuit in fruit flies. “We found in male fruit flies that if they don’t have a lot of experience, they’re willing to court a lot of different potential mating targets, but I found that if something bad happens to them while they’re trying to court or mate, they become really picky about who they court or mate with in the future,” he says. “We found that this is a result of a change to a key population of decision making neurons.”
As a current MCO graduate student in Dragana Rogulja’s lab at Harvard Medical School, Glantz is continuing to work with fruit flies. However, he has switched gears from looking at the sex drive to looking at the circuits that govern the need to sleep.
Glantz and his colleagues want to know what sleep drive looks like at the level of neural circuits and molecules. “The best idea we had was why don’t we find natural-ish situations where animals are really, really, really tired and sleep a lot or not. And then you see what’s different about the brain in both these cases,” he says.
He found that female fruit flies sleep a lot more while in a “pregnancy-like” state. He accidentally discovered this in sleepless mutant flies. “After mating they slept completely normally, as if they didn’t have this mutation that kept them awake,” he says.”They went from sleeping for two or three hours to like fifteen hours, which is really crazy.”
The observation inspired Glantz’s thesis project, which is to use this as a model to study how brains measure, regulate, and execute sleep drive. The approach he is using is to manipulate different molecules and populations of neurons to see if he can find a way to stop mated female flies from sleeping so much. “If you can find neurons or molecules that you can manipulate and prevent this, then there’s a good chance it’s a key regulator [of sleep],” he says.
The NIH F31 will allow Glantz to continue screening for molecules and neurons that might disrupt the flies’ sleeping. He says that the work is still in the early stages but has the potential to shed light on where the sleep drive comes from.
“Ethan discovered a really interesting phenomenon and did a great job of writing his proposal,” Rogulja says. “He was the driver, he noticed the initial phenotype which sparked the project. I think it was well deserved and I am proud of him.”
Glantz says he chose the MCO program because we wanted to be at the institution with the most good labs, and, for him, that was Harvard. Getting to stay in the Boston area was an added bonus, as he enjoys living in the city.
When he’s not wrangling fruit flies, Glantz enjoys cooking home meals and hanging out with his cat Mush Mush. He also likes watching football, and his favorite team is the Detroit Lions, despite his being from New Jersey.
Glantz is grateful to the collaborators and mentors who have given him opportunities to do science and make discoveries. “The people who helped me know,” he says. Glantz adds that Rogulja, in particular, has been important for developing his grant writing skills. ““She deserves a lot of credit for developing this side. Making discoveries is the most important thing, but this is also an important part of the job, which is learning how to write and learning how to put a story together…We are nothing if we are not communicating.”
