As the first member of her family to attend and graduate college, University of Texas at Austin Professor of Psychology Audrey Duarte recalled a number of challenging instances during her career and education. Specifically, she felt the effects of Imposter Syndrome — the feeling of not being good enough to “deserve to be around certain people or at a certain place.”
In Duarte’s case, in spaces of higher education such as her graduate schooling, a major impetus behind the feeling was that there were very few students who shared a similar background and upbringing.
“When I went to graduate school, everybody around me [was] really smart, and there weren’t a lot of people whose families were immigrants like mine or whose parents didn’t go to college,” Duarte explained. “So I felt like they let me in by mistake.”
Even now, Duarte still experiences similar feelings of Imposter Syndrome. However, for people who come from a similar background, she noted that the feeling is quite universal.
Education and Early Career
“As a student, I was always interested in science,” Duarte recalled. “I didn’t know about the different career options — I just knew I liked science.”
During her undergraduate education at the University of California, Davis, Duarte initially pursued the pre-medical track and majored in Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior. She began working at a hospital and joined a research lab, and she quickly realized that she enjoyed conducting research as an undergraduate.
Duarte hoped to remain in the field of medicine, but she wanted to pursue graduate school and a research-focused career rather than applying to medical school to work with patients in a clinical setting.
After deciding to follow through with a career in research, Duarte pursued a Ph.D. in neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley, where she worked with a neurologist and studied patients suffering from strokes and aneurysms with mild cognitive impairment — a condition that parallels early Alzheimer’s disease. Her work, which was adjacent to patient care but still research-focused rather than direct clinical practice, was the perfect match to her interests.
During her time at Berkeley, Duarte worked on understanding the role of the brain’s prefrontal cortex in episodic memory — the memory of everyday events that can be explicitly recollected — and sleep. To achieve this, she studied people who had experienced damage to the prefrontal cortex, through aneurysms or strokes, using neurophysiological techniques.
Most of the time, the subjects she was working with were older, because damage to the prefrontal cortex is more likely as age increases. As she spent time with elderly people, Duarte took an interest in cognitive aging and memory issues in the field of geriatrics.
“When you’re working with older people, it’s natural to start wondering about people who are not cognitively normal,” Duarte added.
Following the completion of her Ph.D., Duarte enrolled in an additional three year postdoctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroscience at the Medical Research Council of the University of Cambridge in England. During this time, she further specialized her skills, particularly with imaging and neuroscience methods.
Once her postdoctoral fellowship concluded, Duarte secured a faculty position as a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology Department of Psychology in Atlanta, Georgia, where she remained for 13 years, working extensively in the university’s aging and psychology program.
“Even though my background was in neuroscience, they were wanting someone in their psychology department with a neuroscience background,” Duarte said. “So it was just a magical fit.”
Then, she received an opportunity to move to the University of Texas (UT) at Austin as a professor of Neurology and Psychology. She particularly appreciated UT Austin’s proximity to Dell Medical School, where she could physically work with patients — another great match to Duarte’s interests.
Pros and Cons of a Research Career
Duarte noted that she loves being able to travel to different parts of the world to present her research at conferences. Growing up, her family was unable to financially support the expenses associated with travel, so she hardly left the state of California until she began pursuing a career in research.
“I’ve been in many parts of the world, different countries, I’ve lived abroad,” Duarte said. “[Research] offers all these great opportunities.”
Duarte also enjoys the flexibility that comes with her career; aside from her teaching and meetings, she is able to create her own work hours and does not have to adhere to a specific schedule. She comes in during normal business hours to coordinate various experiments in her lab, where she works with graduate, undergraduate and high school students.
She currently continues to study sleep, which is highly important for both memory and aging processes in different diseases. Duarte’s team is trying to better understand the inner workings of the brain during sleep that could be contributing to memory impairments — such as Alzheimer’s disease — in older populations.
Duarte also enjoys the mentorship aspect of her job, where she teaches undergraduate students at UT Austin. She draws pride from the fact that she is able to see the trajectory of her previous students, many of whom have successfully completed their Ph.D.s and have also become university professors.
“I know how hard they work to be able to get there,” Duarte said. “So I feel really happy that I played some kind of role mentoring them.”
Acquiring money to conduct her research, however, is a lot more work. Oftentimes, it takes Duarte months to complete a full, 130 page grant, which describes the scope and objectives of the research project.
Most of the funding for Dr. Duarte’s research comes from grants provided by various sponsors, such as the National Institute of Health or the National Science Foundation. These organizations provide money for various expenditures, such as subject payment, imaging facilities and staff payment.
“I would say if you ask a lot of professors, they would probably say that writing grant applications, it’s one of their least favorite things,” Duarte added. “But honestly, if it weren’t for that, [the job] might be perfect.”
Community Impact and Future Goals
Duarte noted that she has made an impact on her fellow researchers in the scientific community and also the health advancement of minority populations. She is known for her work studying memory and cognitive aging in a diverse range of population samples.
“I hope that I make an impact on the community of people who are usually underrepresented in research,” Duarte said. “Something that’s pretty well known is that most studies in both medicine and in basic research in humans … are on white people. This is a very well known problem.”
According to Duarte, this is an issue because experiment results with only white subjects can not be generalized to the general American population, which is racially and ethnically diverse. There are many social and psychological differences across different racial groups — for example, predisposition to cardiovascular disease or access to medical care — and not enough literature has understood how such factors impact health and memory in the brain.
“I hope that by recruiting people and involving people from underrepresented groups in our research that we’re making, at some point, an impact on these communities,” Duarte said. “That’s probably one of the most important things to me.”
Duarte hopes to further understand the connections between sleep and memory across the full adult lifespan. Additionally, she wants to use her findings to apply to policy.
For example, the incoming increase in population of people over the age of 60 is estimated to comprise 25% of the American population in 2050. With such a rapidly expanding elderly population, she wants to aid policymakers with research and suggestions to make things better for geriatric healthcare and well-being.
“When I was a high school student, I thought maybe I would go into politics,” Duarte said. “And I wanted to make a change, I wanted to do something positive. And I still have that in me — I still like the idea of helping to make policies that will help people”.
