As the daughter of a pastor and a therapist, Cristin Welle, Ph.D., grew up with a little bit of analysis and a lot of love. Her parents encouraged her to pursue her passions, and from an early age, Welle was fascinated with the brain.
“Just a couple of years ago, I found an assignment I completed in 5th grade with the question, ‘What do you want to do when you grow up?’” Welle says. “I wrote ‘I want to study the brain,’” Welle says. That interest faded during her formative years, and she decided to study art. But when she took a neurodevelopment class during college, she rediscovered her love of biology and the brain and changed her major to neuroscience.
Shaping a Career
On the heels of that neurodevelopment class, Welle took several science classes, then went to graduate school for neuroscience. She completed her Ph.D. in 2010 at the University of Pennsylvania, then began the Neural Interfaces Program at the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Office of Science and Engineering Lab.
“I wanted to understand how the insights I was uncovering about the brain could be used to help patients,” says Welle. “Our primary focus was studying brain-computer interface technologies, where doctors implant minuscule electrodes into the brain to help patients with tetraplegia from spinal cord injury and other causes interact with their environment.”
Welle’s unique role at the FDA allowed her to serve as a sort of liaison between the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and the NIH, encouraging communication across the government agencies to benefit patients with myriad brain and nervous system deficits.
“I served as a consulting scientific reviewer and that process gave me a big-picture view of the neurotechnology development ecosystem,” Welle says. “It was an amazing experience that really shaped my career.”
After five years at the FDA, Welle transitioned back to academic research, accepting a position as Vice Chair of research at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus in the Department of Neurosurgery and Physiology.
Focusing on the Vagus Nerve
Welle’s lab studies the use of neurotechnology to support patients suffering from conditions that affect the nervous system, from multiple sclerosis and spinal cord injury to depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, working to understand how the brain responds and reacts.
“We want to pilot new technologies, but also understand how these devices interact with the nervous system, particularly to drive plasticity to help the motor rehabilitation,” Welle says. So instead of focusing directly on spinal cord injury, for example, Welle’s lab has been looking at neural technologies more generally.
One promising area: Vagus nerve stimulation. By stimulating the vagus nerve, scientists can activate the parasympathetic system, which signals the body to relax. “Tapping into the vagus nerve can reduce anxiety and inflammation, but it can also drive plasticity and enhance rehabilitation in the brain and spinal cord,” Welle says.
In fact, the primary role of the vagus nerve is to feed your brain information about your body to enhance learning and memory. So when you think about spinal cord injury, stimulating the vagus nerve may help reestablish connection in the brain and spinal cord and improve functional recovery. Welle’s work, for example, is looking to use vagus nerve stimulation to promote the myelination and functional recovery in patients with multiple sclerosis.