About two seconds after meeting Mollie in person, you are not likely to be surprised that she is a cheerleader. She is so full of positive energy, it’s not much of a stretch to picture her cheering enthusiastically for her team. I am willing to bet that most people don’t look at Mollie and assume that she is, in fact, an accomplished neuroscientist at a top university—but being predictable has never ranked high on Mollie’s to-do list. And isn’t it nice to know we don’t need to waste our time doing just what is expected of us too?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to my rugby game.

Just kidding. But, hey, maybe someday!

Learning about Mollie Woodworth, neuroscientist, slicer of mouse brains (!), and MIT cheerleader, made me think about my first-ever MRI scan on my brain. I dreaded it. I had nightmares and daymares about it! I dreamed of feeling trapped inside a steel coffin with weird zoort-like noises and the sound of somebody somewhere banging on metal with a hammer. Featuring 250 shades of gray!

Turned out it was a little like that but not so bad at all. I eased my early anxiety in a way perhaps peculiar to nerds, by thinking about all the people whose intelligence, imagination, and hard work had come together to create and make routine the use of this amazing contraption.

And amazing it is. Imagine: a giant magnet that makes hydrogen atoms dance around and align inside our tender tissues, yet we feel nothing at all. Three-D pictures of our innards result, with as many as 250 distinct shades of gray! And a radiologist waits in the wings equipped to decipher their meaning. How ordinary. How extraordinary!

In the process of editing videos for our series, I often find myself having to research some of the fascinating topics our scientists and engineers talk about. While doing my research, it’s not uncommon for me to find that I’ve gotten carried away and read an entire Wikipedia article; an entire hour blown. Then it’s time to scramble to catch up!

She means it… and so do we! For Mollie’s “secret” video, I knew right away that I wanted to visualize the MIT cheer on-screen as dense and nerdy as possible! But I also wanted to show it correctly (well, as correctly as a cheer comprised of nonsensical mathematics can be rendered), so I started in on my research. And while doing some digging around, I came up with numerous variants of her MIT cheer adapted for a menagerie of universities.

Here’s one from RPI (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute):

e to the x dy dx

tangent, secant, cosine, sine

3.14159

square root, cube root, log of pi

disintegrate them RPI!

Northwestern University introduced the asymptote to bend the cheer it to their will:

e to the x, dx dy

e to the y, dy

cosine, tangent, inverse, sine

add an asymptotic line

come on Wildcats, hold that line!

For neuroscientist Mollie Woodworth’s first anniversary, her husband gave her a synthetic replica of a mouse brain that he made himself. Although Mollie says the first anniversary present is supposed to be paper, not brains, she’s more than pleased. “I think it was fantastically romantic,” says Mollie of her husband’s gift. “It was something wonderful that he took a lot of time and effort to design, and that he knew I would love. He used data from an online mouse brain atlas to design the brain in his CAD software, then printed it on a 3D printer. I keep it on the shelf above my desk in the lab, along with my squishy brain, stuffed rabbit, and a card from him that says “You’re my prime mate” with a picture of two monkeys. He and I like to give each other silly presents, clearly.”

Here’s her brain: Has your spouse ever given you a 3D model of a mouse brain? We didn’t think so.

I wanted to highlight a question asked by Barb on my question thread, and share a little about what it’s like to be a biomedical scientist working on basic research problems with possible applications to disease therapies. Here’s the question Barb asked:

“Mollie, I’d like to pick your brain for resources. I have a son, 30, MIT alum, PhD physics. He has incurred brain damage… If it were your brother, what would you do for him?”

Because my lab’s explicit long-term research goal is to be able to fix diseased and damaged brain circuitry, we get questions like this with some frequency. A few of our postdoctoral fellows did their graduate work in our field, and they talk about the times they answered the lab phone to find a patient or a distraught parent on the other end, begging them to help. We hurt every time we get questions like this, because we don’t have the luxury of being snake oil salesmen with a cure for anything and everything. All we want is a cure for this one tiny corner of human suffering, but we don’t even have that in hand.

The evident humor in Mollie’s MIT cheer sounds like a bunch of really techie sorts got together and decided to use their brains. Maybe cheerleading even led to Mollie’s interest in brain research.

Our beloved periodic table deserves a cheer, right? All this thinking about cheers and science made me wonder what sort of science cheers might work. So I checked out the periodic table to refresh my memory and wrote my own cheer, even though I was a majorette and we didn’t cheer. Anyway, here’s a chemistry cheer:

Periodic Table of the Elements Cheer

Hydrogen, helium, hafnium, gold

Gas, gas, transition metal, yellow and bold.

Alkali, halogen, noble, or rare

Check the periodic table, everyone’s there.

When Mollie Woodworth wears her MIT Cheerleading jacket, people often think the jacket is a joke and want to order one. According to Mollie, one interaction went like this: “I was walking over the Harvard Bridge from Boston to MIT—this was when I was an undergrad—and someone tapped me on the shoulder and asked where I’d gotten the jacket. I was pretty flabbergasted—I mean, when you’re within a stone’s throw of MIT, I would think you’d just assume someone was a student. I don’t recall her offering me money for it. It was awhile back, but I think I’d remember an offer of money, because undergrads are frivolous and use money to buy things like shoes, while graduate students just buy food. (The greatest success of my week this week so far has been buying lunch for $2 and eating it in 2 minutes. It was so cheap, and so efficient. Grad student nirvana.)”

Yes, MIT has a cheerleading squad. And Mollie is the squad coach. See more about her jacket in our “The Blood Will Tell” video. How much would you pay for this jacket? Really. How much? YOU CAN’T HAVE IT!

There’s been a lot of excitement over the past few years about genes linked to brain diseases. You may have heard that people carrying certain variations of the LRRK2 gene, for example, have an increased risk of Parkinson’s disease.

But did you know that gene expression—that is, the translation of DNA into RNA and, eventually, into proteins—can vary quite a bit in different tissues and cell types?

LRRK2 expression map made by Virginia (Image courtesy Allen Institute for Brain Science) That’s why, in 2006, the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle launched the Allen Mouse Brain Atlas, an online, three-dimensional map of the critters’ brains. Since the 19th century, scientists have been mapping various regions of the brain—such as the outer layer, or cortex, that “Secret Life” star Mollie Woodworth studies. But the Allen Brain Institute is zooming in much, much closer, mapping the complicated brain expression patterns of more than 21,000 genes (that’s more than 80 percent of all mouse genes!).

So Mollie Woodworth was a cheerleader at MIT while she was an undergraduate. And she continues to coach the team, even though she’s now a graduate student at Harvard. What’s the difference between cheering and coaching for Mollie? She explains, “I’m a coach in the sense that I’m older than they [the other cheerleaders] are. And I have a lot more war stories. And also I’m older than they are. That’s reason number one and number three.”

Here’s the MIT crew in action.

Watching Mollie’s video it’s difficult not to be swept up in her enthusiasm for science and for her own research. Indeed, she’s one of the best “Cheerleaders for Science” that I’ve ever seen. Although we’re familiar with the concept of cheerleading in this part of the world (Ireland), it’s predominantly just from American movies and TV programmes. The fact is, we don’t have many cheerleaders in Ireland, and we play some very different sorts of sports.

A portrait of the hurler as a young man. For this, my first guest post for “Secret Life,” I thought I’d introduce you to an Irish sport which many will not have seen before. It’s calling hurling and it is the fastest field sport in the world.

Hurling is not unlike field hockey, except it is played on a much larger scale, at a faster speed and with the added factor of allowing high balls. The game is played on a field 137-145 metres long and 80-90 metres wide, and the object is to propel a small leather ball (or sliothar) into or over a goal erected at either end of the field. The players use a hurley (a c.1 metre long wooden stick) to hit the ball and a sliothar, well struck, will reach speeds of up to about 100 mph. This year, over 80,000 people packed into Croke Park in Dublin to watch the culmination of the hurling year, when Tipperary took on Kilkenny in the All-Ireland Final.

Welcome to Secret Life Snap Shots, a new series of posts where we’ll share some of our favorite “Secret Life” photos. Today’s photo is of the famous DNA-inspired scarf that belongs to our own cheerleading neuroscientist, Mollie Woodworth. Mollie claims the DNA scarf is a popular pattern among scientists who love to knit. “I’d wanted to make it ever since I learned how to knit, but I’d always thought it was too hard,” says Mollie. “I didn’t know how to make cables. But I lost the only handknit scarf I’d made myself, and being without a scarf in Boston in the winter is a losing proposition, so I decided to buckle down and make it in a fabulous girly pink wool/alpaca blend.”  For more on the scarf, see Mollie’s 10 Questions video. Your neck is cold and you love science… time to cover your neck with cozy DNA goodness!

I never came close to being a cheerleader. Aside from being inherently uncoordinated (I think, as I try to remember just how I got this giant bruise on my knee), I couldn’t deal with the big crowds. Very early in my life, I fell in love with the most solitary sport: swimming. When I started high school, I didn’t hesitate to join the swim team. Lucky for me, they didn’t have tryouts.

Underwater… but cheerful I held a permanent place in Lane 6, which was reserved for the most—ahem—casual swimmers. I am not built for speed, but I loved swimming so much that I kept at it for three years, even though I never really got any better. Just before our meets would begin, the whole team would gather on one end of the pool and do swim cheers. Already a history nerd in the making, my favorite cheer started out “Now listen children and you will hear/bout the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” Although it was definitely not as factual as Mollie’s “formula” cheer, I was psyched to have swimming and history, two of my favorite things, meet up.

Like all of the SLOSE scientists and engineers, there is a point where the secret and the science, or the passion and the work, will intersect. I’m not sure if Mollie has a cheer about mouse brains or sequences, but I would totally cheer along with her if she did.

And Mollie, you may think your MIT cheerleading jacket gets a lot of attention, but I will raise you one Brookline Swimming and Diving sweatshirt with “WHO LET THE DOGS OUT” filling up the entire back. My friends have stolen that thing for weeks at a time.

Juggling mouse brains and pom-poms is not an easy task, but Mollie has found some time to start answering your questions. Check it out here.

These people all have secrets… trust us, they really do If Mollie and I have one thing in common, it’s that we both have trouble keeping cool on the subway.

There’s something about the unspoken code of silence on the subway that makes me want to bust out laughing at that lingering patch of shaving cream on some dude’s ear. And I think it’s the same reason that people laugh at church and in classrooms: because you’re not supposed to.

Hearing about Mollie’s awesome mouse-brain secret on the subway reminded me of the first time I caught someone else struggling to keep it together in transit. Before then, I thought all other NYC subway passengers (mariachi bands aside) were heartless commuting machines: efficient and unyielding, all just waiting for the sucker from Pennsylvania (me) to unwittingly block the door so they could revoke his subway privileges.

Seeing someone else lose their cool reminded me that we’ve all got our weird stuff. Maybe that girl is holding in a secret about mouse brains. That Wall Street guy looks uncomfortable; maybe he’s suppressing something else. That’s what makes train rides interesting. We’ve all got our secrets, and it’s always fun when someone lets one slip.

You’ve got a cool secret, Mollie. Not every smart girl is willing to stake her reputation in the lab by wearing a sweet cheerleading jacket. If your lab friends give you flack for your secret spunk, just tell them to keep their thoughts in their “meat computers” (as per Mollie’s “Only I Knew” video).

You are pulling both jobs off.

Mollie loves giraffes! As you might imagine from images of cheerleaders in popular culture (e.g., the Taylor Swift song “You Belong with Me,” which makes it quite clear that being “cheer captain” and “wear[ing] t-shirts” are incompatible pursuits), it often comes to pass that I must figure out how to make geek chic, or else lose both my science cred and my cheerleader cred.

I have collected a few shirts that do the trick when one is trying to look stylish and nerdy simultaneously. A few are from commercial sites, especially Threadless. You’re styling, dude!

(In addition to liking knitting and cheerleading, I really like giraffes. They have super-long necks, but the same number of neck vertebrae as you and me. I think that is totally cool.)

This one reminds me to give my mice an extra scratch on the nose or an extra mouse treat. (Did you know that mice apparently love things that are bacon-flavored? Where do mice eat bacon in the wild? They also love Nutella, which seems thousands of times more logical to me.)

Nine-year-old Mollie reading Who is Mollie Woodworth?

Well, she was responsible for the first pom-poms we ever had in the “Secret Life” studios. I know that for a fact.

And she knits a mean DNA scarf.

But several months after we interviewed Mollie, this is how I remember her.

She is the young girl who sat in the bleachers, off to herself, with her nose in a book, while the rest of her family screamed their heads off at high school sporting events.

She is the grown-up woman who brings dinosaur valentines and cake to her colleagues at a high-powered Harvard University neurological lab. Grown-up Mollie cheering

She is the researcher who loves her fuzzy lab mice, but who is more than willing to slice up their little brains to look for ways to treat neurological diseases in humans.

And she is absolutely full of cheer… whether she’s talking about the fabulous peanut butter pie she ate with her husband at TGI Friday’s or when she’s screaming her head off at an MIT basketball game (as you know by watching her video “The Blood Will Tell,” she gave into genetics and is now carrying on the family business).

I’m nowhere near as sunny as Mollie. But when we worked with her, and when I think about her now, I’m cheerful.

Thanks, Mollie.

If you ask a really amazing question, she might even cheer for you!

So show some spirit—ask Mollie your questions in the Comments section of this post.

UPDATE: We are no longer taking more questions for Mollie. But check out her answers in the comments. She may have already answered a question you were going to ask!