We think this positive feedback is involved in part of the mechanism of vocal learning.

If you raise vocal-learning birds that hear tape-recorded sounds of their own species, but not live animals, they won’t grow up imitating those sounds. They’ll produce something aberrant. But if you give them a living bird — of another species, even — they will imitate that other species. They’d rather imitate a live bird of another species than taped sounds of their own species. Social interaction, and the feeling of getting a reward from another, is determining what you imitate.

That’s why humans aren’t imitating all the songbirds out there. One of the Ph.D. students I’m co-advising, Constantina Theofanopoulou, and I recently published a paper arguing that oxytocin, the bonding hormone, could be controlling the social mechanism of vocal learning. When a child says “Daddy” and is rewarded with a pat on the back or a smile, that gives the child a rewarding feeling. That feeling may release oxytocin into the vocal-learning circuits, to strengthen the memory in the vocal-learning pathway of how to say that sound.

What implications does your research on birds have for human spoken language?

We’ve been studying a gene called FOXP2 that, when mutated in humans, causes a speech deficit. People with the mutation have good auditory learning; they can understand speech relatively well, both cognitively and auditorily. But they have a harder time producing the sounds. And when that gene is knocked out in the songbird brain, they also have difficulty imitating sounds. So we initially thought this was a convergent function of the gene.

But we recently found that when the exact human mutation of the gene is put into the mouse genome, the mice can still produce their vocalizations, they just can’t switch to more complex, innate sequences that females prefer. That makes us think this gene was already there and being used for sequencing of vocalizations, even before advanced vocal learning evolved. Humans and songbirds just depend more on that gene than mice do. It also means that we can use mice and songbirds, along the continuum, as models to study genes involved in spoken language disorders.

But before we get there, we first have to continue studying what the parallel brain regions in songbirds and humans are, what the homologous and convergent cell types are.

So the path you took to get to this point didn’t start with science, but with dance. How did that influence your scientific pursuits?

I started out as a dancer in high school. Most of my family, particularly on my mother’s side, were into the performing arts. I went to the High School of Performing Arts here in New York City, where I majored in ballet. I also eventually did some jazz and African dance. And then, when I was graduating high school, I took the advice my mother gave me all the time growing up: “Do something that has a positive impact on society.” I felt I could do that better as a scientist than as a dancer, and I did like science a lot. But I learned that being trained to become a dancer also trained me to become a scientist.

To be a scientist, you need to have a lot of discipline, which I learned from practicing dance so much; and you need to be creative, something I was prepared for by choreographing dance. You need to accept a lot of failure before you have success. Many experiments don’t work the first, second or ninth time around. It’s the same in dance. And neither is a 9-to-5 job. It’s something that you have to become passionate about.

Are you still dancing?

Yes. I thought I would stop one day, but it hasn’t happened [laughs]. After I got into college, I danced African dance for a number of years, including when I went down to Duke to become a professor there. Then, about six years ago, I switched to doing a lot of salsa dancing, and performed with the Cobo Brothers dance team until I came to New York.

You mentioned your mother’s influence on your decision to become a scientist. What about your father?

So they both actually went to high school in music and arts, to become singers. But my father had a passion for science, and when he went to college he majored in chemistry, until he dropped out after having us four kids, and kind of tuned out of society as well. My parents eventually got divorced. But although I didn’t grow up with him past the age of six, I would see him a lot. And he influenced my thinking: What was he trying to achieve as a scientist? He was trying to understand how the universe works, how civilization began. And in some ways, I felt like I was actually taking up the reins where he left off. His passion did that.

Opportunities for him, as an African-American, were more difficult than they were for me. He felt he was mistreated by some of his teachers, for example. He really studied hard, and skipped two grades in elementary and junior high school. A story he told me before he passed was that he was taken out of a mostly underrepresented-minority school in the Bronx and was put in a mostly white school, and he felt that the teachers resented him and made it harder for him on his exams and so on. That kind of experience has influenced me, how I think about things going forward as a person of color. I’ve felt some of that isolation: Even [as an undergraduate], when I went to international conferences, most of the people were white. And when I went to Duke, even though there’s an even higher population of people of African-American descent in the South, it was quite the opposite on campus. And I started to see what people are thinking. They wouldn’t realize they were saying racially charged things. Like when I was interviewing for graduate school, somebody told me, “Don’t go to that part of New Haven, because blacks and Puerto Ricans are living there, it’s a pretty dangerous neighborhood.” And I’m thinking, “Did I just hear that?” Or I’d be the first African-American to get some award, and someone would [imply that] it was given to me because of the color of my skin.

Like my mother says: “You can’t be as good, you have to be better.” It’s common to hear that as someone from an underrepresented-minority background.

And now that you’re in a teaching position, you’ve been working to develop a program for underrepresented minority students to come and do research at Rockefeller. How have your own experiences shaped your approach?

There are a lot of hardworking people out there with a lot of talent. But if they don’t have the third piece of that equation — opportunity — then their talent and hard work is not going to go far. Hunter College gave me the opportunity. We’ll be working on a program [at Rockefeller] to bring undergraduate students into a high-intensity research institution, into the laboratories of Nobel laureates, to provide them the opportunity as well.

We need to start “fixing the leaking pipeline,” supporting underrepresented minorities as postdocs and faculty to keep them in the sciences. A program was just started by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to provide fellowships for eight years, called the Hanna H. Gray Fellows Program, named after one of their former board chairs. We have to fix how society thinks. We’re having workshops and classes to discuss things like unconscious bias, creating opportunities for the people affected by those biases to trust their own value. And I also think role models make a big difference.

Having people of diverse backgrounds helps science as well. When there are diverse backgrounds, you do have to manage cultural differences, but those cultural differences also bring different ways of thinking and lead to new ideas — good ideas — that you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. Diversity generates a broader and more productive scientific operation.