I was in Biology when Dr. Wardlaw gave our class her first speech about the importance of sleep. At that point, I was quite proud of my 2 a.m. bedtime, and she was — and still is — a great teacher, but I still thought, Who is she to give me advice about sleep? Turns out that the mysterious “Dr.” in her title was what gave her plenty of credibility.
For those who don’t know, Dr. Wardlaw teaches some Honors Chemistry and all Neurochemistry classes at Lakeside. However, before teaching here, she worked as a researcher, earning her PhD in Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of Washington.
She had to endure twenty-four hour shifts in the lab and isolation from family and friends as a result of her dedication to her research.
The process of earning this level of a degree is long and difficult, as explained by Dr. Wardlaw during our interview: In particular, she had to endure 24-hour shifts in the lab and isolation from family and friends as a result of her dedication to her research. But she also mentioned that passion prompted her thesis in the first place. Dr. Wardlaw’s interest in neuroscience, specifically the function of memory and learning, began in high school and has stayed with her until now. So, after working for a graduate student while an undergraduate, she expanded on his experiments around memory for her own dissertation — specifically, she studied correlations between memory and sleep on a cellular level.
Most mammals, from humans to mice, have a molecular clock. This internal clock uses circadian rhythms to regulate things like our meal times and cycle of sleep (sleep-wake cycle). This clock is located in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) — a part of the hypothalamus — which is approximately in the center of the brain. The experiments of the aforementioned graduate student focused on lesioning (injuring via blunt force) the SCN in order to measure the connection between the SCN and memory in the hippocampus. His experiments suggested a relationship between circadian rhythms in the SCN and memory function in the hippocampus.
While this graduate student worked with lesioning the SCN, Dr. Wardlaw’s experiments used a genetic approach, targeting the BMAL1 molecule, which controls our circadian rhythm, especially our immune system, via the promotion of the translation of certain gene controls. She aimed to inhibit the function of the SCN and thus circadian rhythms in mice. She hypothesized that this molecular clock, and by extension, circadian rhythms, were required for proper function of the hippocampus and memory. To save you from reading a 75-page dissertation, the results of her experiment essentially supported her original hypothesis: Mice that had an impacted SCN had impaired performance on memory challenges and on learning. This further s upports the idea that throwing off one’s internal clock with poor sleep rhythms truly does impact learning and memory.
Dr. Wardlaw has carried these findings with her, even as she’s moved away from the research field and towards teaching. Reflecting on her time working on her PhD, she’s glad that she persevered through tough times, but during that time, she also learned that instead of being hyper-focused on one topic of research at a time, she wanted to instead share science with others. Now a teacher at Lakeside, Dr. Wardlaw can be found giving out tips on how to improve our sleep schedule — and considering the wild and wacky world of Lakesiders’ circadian rhythms, maybe Lakeside students like myself should heed them.
