Dr. Jennifer Robinson remembers wanting a microscope for her fifth birthday. “I always wanted to know how things worked and what they were made of,” she recalled. The Director of the Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences Ph.D. program in the Department of Psychology at Auburn University, Robinson is still seeking those answers.

“My job is to learn. That is the best description I can think of to explain what I do. I observe human behaviors and then study how the brain supports those behaviors,” she clarified. “There are no restraints or parameters. The sky is the limit. We make substantial progress in many areas, but what is left to be understood is daunting. It changes all the time.”

GROWING UP IN CLEVELAND AREA

Robinson and her brother grew up living with their mother on Cleveland’s West Side (Lakewood) next door to their grandparents. She always felt supported by her family for her love of medicine. “They always said I should be a doctor because I liked science and was compassionate,” she recalled. Ironically, that compassion would eventually move her away from medicine and more into science.

Another passion of hers that her family supported was competing in athletics. “I always played softball and basketball in high school. I liked basketball better because I felt like I was always improving, as I was not the best,” she remarked. “Softball came much more naturally for me so I didn’t have to work as hard.” Unfortunately, her basketball career came to a halt when she tore her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), so she focused solely on softball during her latter high school years. After playing third base for years, Robinson was asked to switch positions. “They wanted me to catch,” she recollected. “I went to one pitcher-catcher practice and hated it, and never went back. The first day of all-squad practice, they told me to put on the gear and the rest is history. I ended up catching from then on (after I recovered from my ACL surgery, of course).”

She decided to attend nearby Case Western Reserve University with the goal of pursuing a medical career. Going to college was always a given, but not because her family had plenty of money. “I was always grateful to be able to go to college, but it did not dawn on me at the time how much of a sacrifice my mother made for that to happen,” she stated. “She did such a great job of masking her own financial limitations. It is Impossible to adequately describe her. She is the most selfless individual I have ever known in a humbling and modest way. She instilled in us that we could be and do anything.”

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

Robinson played softball for the Spartans from 1999 to 2002, earning UAA All-Association honors in both her first and last years. The 1999 team won its third consecutive UAA title and the 2002 team was the program’s first to qualify for the NCAA Division III Softball Championship. She batted .340 for her collegiate career with 60 runs scored, 25 doubles, six home runs, and 71 runs batted in over 143 games.

Two of her most memorable moments centered around her family. “We were playing a game at Allegheny (College) and they had this huge hill. My grandfather’s health wasn’t too good at the time and he was about to take the hill back to the car, but decided to stay long enough to watch me bat one more time,” she remembered. “I hit my first collegiate home run, which turned out to be the game-winner, in that at-bat. Recalling giving him my home run ball still brings tears to my eyes to this day.”

That memory also reminded Robinson of one of her favorite aspects of the collegiate game. “In high school, we played on a field with no fences. No matter how far you hit the ball, you had to run,” she laughed. “The biggest perk of college softball was having an outfield fence and not having to run for a home run!”

Qualifying for the NCAA tournament was a highlight for the program and came with an added bonus for Robinson. “Just making to regionals for the first time was super exciting. One of my favorite moments that weekend was my mother surprising me by coming to the games on Mother’s Day,” she recollected. “Her boss from her second job let her have the day off so she drove the three hours to come see me play.”

By her junior year, she realized that she was drawn more to science than medicine. “I really liked the science part. I loved medicine, but I didn’t like that you couldn’t heal or help everyone,” she stated. “That would be very difficult for me. That was part of the career that I just didn’t think I could handle.”

What Robinson could see herself doing was studying the brain. “I was fascinated by the connection between the mind, body, and the brain, and how we form memories,” she articulated. “This two-pound organ somehow creates us. How we are, how we operate, and how nature works are wrapped up in the brain. It is so beautiful and elegant in its complexity.”

She earned a dual degree in biochemistry and psychology, and began pursuing her master’s degree in experimental psychology with a focus on psychophysiology and neuroscience methodology. “I always knew I would eventually be in academia,” she expressed. “I wanted to still be a part of the medical world and that applied piece. I wanted my research to make a difference and impact lives. I would have never guessed that it would take me on the journey that it has.”

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which is the foremost technique for measuring and mapping brain activity, was in its early stages at that time. CWRU had just purchased a high-resolution fMRI scanner. “I was at the right place at the right time. Our psychology graduate program paid for me to take a course at Harvard and to teach others when I came back,” she described. “It was in its infancy and I was thankful to see it at its beginning stages. It produced beautiful, but imperfect, pictures of the brain and seeing those things improve over time has been fascinating. Every day I get chills when I see someone else’s brain. We see this organ that makes them everything they are, creating their thoughts, and everything about them. It is a fascinating and humbling technique.”

PRACTICAL WORK

Robinson earned her Ph.D. in psychology in May 2006 and sought her post-doctorate fellowship, which is an opportunity for recent Ph.D. students to develop a skill set to do something different from their dissertation to be more well-rounded and marketable. “I needed experience scanning and analyzing data, and I was fortunate to get that opportunity at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio,” she recounted. “Within a couple years after graduating, I was in the operating room helping neurosurgeons plan brain surgeries by mapping their patient’s brains. Getting that experience was a remarkably special part of my journey. It made me realize how impactful my research could be with direct implications for people going through substantial medical crises.”

She spent the two years of her fellowship in psychiatric neuroimaging and was then recruited to work at Baylor Scott & White Health to perform all the brain mapping for the Department of Neurosurgery. She also designed and built psychophysiological and functional neuroimaging laboratories.

“At this point, fMRI is more than just brain mapping at a basic level. We are moving away from just answering what parts of the brain are active to looking at the dynamics of the brain. In other words, ‘How does region A talk to region B?’ We study the connectivity of regions and how they communicate with one another,” she elucidated. “It’s like a big ocean and we have seen the tip of the iceberg. Brain mapping has often been compared to going to the moon. Some people call it the next moonshot. We are trying to understand 100 billion neurons that talk to each other in different ways every millisecond.”

Robinson’s original plan was to return to Cleveland after her two-year fellowship. Instead, she worked at Baylor Scott & White for four years. “I was pretty happy in Texas, but at the same time, the timing was right to think about somewhere else,” she recalled. “That’s when I saw a job open at Auburn that intrigued me. Auburn had received funding to build an imaging center that was state-of-the-art. They were acquiring a brain scanner that only a few others in the country had (Vanderbilt and Harvard being two others). I applied and didn’t think much of it.”

She was thrilled to be invited to interview for the position. “I didn’t prep too much for it because I didn’t want to be stressed out,” she remarked. “Academic interviews are several days long. The first day, I knew there was something really special about Auburn and I fell in love with it. I called my best friend that night and said, ‘If they offer me the position, I have to take it.’ They offered me the job a week later and I accepted. It felt right then and it still does today. It was one of my few really good decisions.”

In her seventh year at Auburn, Robinson, in addition to directing the Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences Ph.D. Program, also teaches and continues to do research. “There is no such thing as an average or typical day, it is always something different,” she said. “I teach a lot of neuroscience courses and I didn’t realize how much I missed it when I was in the clinical world. I love interacting with students and hearing their perspective, which improves my research. It is a symbiotic relationship when you work with high-caliber students like the ones at Auburn.”

LESSONS FROM HOME

Another benefit of her position at Auburn is having winter break and summers to return to Cleveland and be with her family.

One of her mother’s lessons she has taken with her throughout her studies and her career is to simply do her best. “That is a game-changer from a mental health perspective to do your best each day. We see that earlier and earlier, kids are getting stressed out by expectations,” she stated. “I am so grateful that the concept my mother taught us was putting forth your best at that moment. ‘Did you do your best today?’ We learned to accept that some days your best is not ideal, but it is the best you had that day. She always said, ‘If you can come to me and say you did your best, I won’t be disappointed. Just put it on the table and do your best. It’s okay if it wasn’t meant to be.’”

Robinson’s mother was the oldest of five children and only her two youngest siblings attended college. “She was always in the role of caretaker. She worked at 7-Eleven and put 100 percent into it. She treated everyone like kings and queens. We grew up with that kind of mindset,” she explained. “She told us to treat people right, work hard, and follow your heart. Those are my takeaways from my childhood. She never compromised her time with us, and on the rare occasion she couldn’t be there for us, we were always with family.”

With her family’s encouragement, Robinson has set her sights on three tenets of life. “Family, intellectual pursuit, and making a difference for others are where my focus has been and will always be,” she declared. “I do want to get back to Cleveland at some point. Would I ever leave this job or retire? It would be really hard to do since I enjoy it so much. The amazing things that I have seen have never been things I have predicted, so I am always open to what’s next. For now, I just consider it an honor to work for Auburn University and a privilege to learn and make sense of the things I find fascinating.”