Dr. Richard Aldrich

As a neuroscience doctoral student at Stanford University in the late 1970’s, Richard Aldrich was fascinated by how the electrical properties of a single cell were controlled. This fascination led to a specific interest in perception and circuit properties.

After a postdoctoral physiology stint at Yale University, Aldrich returned to Stanford to teach - first in the neurobiology department, and then in the physiology department of Stanford’s medical school.

“Medicals schools run in very different ways than primarily undergraduate campuses do,” Aldrich says. “At medical schools, the focus tends to be on the link between research and medicine rather than the link between research and education.”

Aldrich likes that UT Austin doesn‘t have a medical school. While there are many beneficial aspects to working at a medical school, Aldrich says he prefers an environment where the emphasis is on academic goals and contact with undergraduates rather than one that is “seriously concerned with healthcare economics - making the hospital profitable.”

The challenge of teaching complex concepts to students of diverse backgrounds is one of Aldrich‘s favorite aspects of being a professor. He also likes fine-tuning information so it’s understandable and interesting to those coming at it from many different perspectives.

“There’s nothing better in this business than to find a student who gets excited about what you’re teaching and you see has so much potential to do great things,” Aldrich says. “It’s great to know that you had an effect on someone and get to watch them form a connection with the material.”

Those wishing to follow in Aldrich‘s footsteps are advised to pick a scientific question whose answer they are intent on discovering. “That provides the motivation to get through the tough times and have the intellectual drive to do what you have to do to answer a particular problem because the problem bothers you so much you just want to know how it’s going to turn out,” he says.

Many of the early-stage graduate students with whom Aldrich has worked over the years worried about what they would study. Aldrich believes picking almost any research topic and pursuing it with focus will turn out to be gratifying.

“Biology is at a stage now that it’s not hard to find an interesting problem to work on,” he says.

A nagging intellectual spark is largely what has motivated Aldrich. From his Stanford days, his research focus has evolved to more basic levels of organization - from animal to organ to cell to molecule. Recently, however, he’s refocused on higher-level organization such as making transgenic mice unable to make certain types of ion channels. Predictably, these creatures’ ailments include blood pressure regulation and bladder control. Unpredictable problems such as circadian rhythm disruption have emerged as well.

“One of the really neat things about modern biology is that you’re not stuck at a particular level of organization,” Aldrich says. “You can move up and down from animal to cellular within the context of a single lab and have it all relate together in a satisfying way.”

The nervous system in particular is an excellent area for biology research right now, he says. “It’s exploding in so many different directions. One of the challenges we have now is integrating different sub-fields of neuroscience that used to be distinct that are flowing together and reorganizing.”

As recently-appointed chair of UT’s section of neurobiology, Aldrich believes part of his role is “trying to see where neurobiology will be in 10 years, and facing the challenge of coming at it in new and interesting ways.”