Inspiring Greatness

Photo of Dr. William Newsome
Photo of Dr. William Newsome
Stetson University is the place that taught William Newsome, Ph.D., how to think critically.

When William Newsome, Ph.D., first started his career at Stetson, he never guessed the president of the United States would ask him to lead a major medical-research project.

But that’s exactly what happened when President Barack Obama tapped him to become the co-chair of the National Institutes of Health’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative

Before Newsome ’74 dared to be significant he did not have a lot of confidence in himself. Newsome explained that once he began interacting with Stetson’s faculty and students, he was inspired to achieve greatness.

“I came from a small high school in a small Florida town, and I had no particular reason to believe that I could compete successfully with the best students at Stetson, much less at the great research universities of the world,” Newsome said. “At Stetson, I learned how to think critically, how to express my thinking in quantitative terms and in writing, and I became convinced that I had enough on the ball to at least advance to the next level, a major Ph.D. program, to see how I stacked up there.”

When Newsome was recognized for his capabilities to contribute to the BRAIN Initiative, he was teaching neurobiology at Stanford. Now he still balances being a professor there and a leading neurobiological researcher for the president.

Newsome credits his passion for the brain to his liberal arts education at Stetson.

“My interest in the brain developed during my years at Stetson,” he says. “I developed the conviction that all of our mental and emotional lives — from doing science, to composing music, to making moral and political judgments — derive from the activity of a single organ, the brain. To really understand human behavior in all of its complexity requires understanding the brain and how it accomplishes diverse tasks. Neurobiology thus emerged for me as the most important and fun thing I could study for the rest of my life!”

The BRAIN Initiative is perhaps the most prestigious project U.S. scientists have engaged in to date. If successful, the research that Newsome is doing will yield a new dynamic picture of the brain that will revolutionize how we treat, cure and even prevent various brain disorders by exploring how the brain processes, stores and retrieves information.

The BRAIN Initiative is an attempt to catalyze major advances in brain research by investing a relatively modest amount of federal money in strategic new technologies and conceptual approaches to understanding the brain,” Newsome said. “New technologies invented in the past 10 years are permitting us to do experiments and make new measurements that previous generations could only dream about.”

“Exploiting the new opportunities requires collaboration among researchers from many disciplines — from physics, chemistry and engineering, to molecular biology, neuroscience and psychology. It is an ‘all hands on deck’ effort,” he elaborated. “Tool-makers must work in close collaboration with tool-users, and theorists must work in close collaboration with experimentalists. Together, a large-scale interdisciplinary effort of this sort can completely remake our understanding of the brain over the next couple of decades, thereby creating fundamentally new opportunities for advances in artificial intelligence and in treating devastating neurological and psychiatric diseases. The BRAIN Initiative, if funded generously by Congress, will enable these goals to be achieved.”

Newsome explained that he and his colleagues have several high-priority research tasks necessary to complete this arduous mission. First, the brain’s network must be understood, so Newsome and his team are working to map the structure and components of the brain’s circuits. With this map, they will be able to better understand what the brain is composed of at the molecular, cellular and structural levels and see how these properties change as we age or develop brain disorders.

Next, the team will record neuron activity across time and space. Newsome said that understanding the electrical and chemical activity of neurons is crucial to the BRAIN Initiative. This task presents several challenges because the brain has roughly 100 billion neurons operating on different spatial and temporal scales. By studying how neurons behave in different sections of the brain — like the hippocampus, which controls memory — and how these neurons interact with one another, Newsome and his colleagues hope to learn how to remedy the behavioral or cognitive mechanisms for those who suffer from brain disorders.

Then, in order to remedy the behavioral or cognitive mechanisms, Newsome and his fellow researchers must learn how to manipulate the circuit activity. Healthy brains have patterns that those with disorders do not follow. Neuroscientists are learning how to stimulate neurons so that these patterns can mimic the brain’s natural activity.

The rest of Newsome’s research will rely on theory, modeling and statistics for the experiments he and his team will conduct. By using the newest technology and scientific techniques paired with the researchers’ unique approach toward the data they collect, Newsome is confident they will be able to complete their map of the brain and share this knowledge with scientists worldwide so that brain disorders can become ailments of the past.

Newsome believes that Stetson not only prepared him to take on such an ambitious project, but also to approach life with an open but always critical mind.

“The best thing about Stetson for me was that I could move easily between different departments and areas of study,” he said. “Stetson’s small size, combined with the diverse interests of its faculty, enabled me to break out of traditional disciplinary silos and acquire a ‘big picture’ look at some of the major problems we are facing as a society.

“I was a physics major, but I took many courses in chemistry, biology, philosophy and religious studies,” Newsome continued. “I learned to see specific problems from different points of view and different research methodologies. This ability to appreciate and blend different disciplinary perspectives was critical in my co-leadership of the BRAIN Initiative planning process.”

Newsome offered straightforward advice to current students that he wishes he had heard when he was younger: “Learn more mathematics!”

“The time to learn math is when you are young, and quantitative analysis is increasingly important in nearly all fields of research,” he said. “I took a non-trivial amount of math as a physics major at Stetson, but I should have dug deeper into differential equations, linear algebra, probability theory and statistics, and signal processing.

“Every undergraduate interested in advanced research should learn to write good code!” Newsome said. “If I followed my own advice, I do wonder what I would have given up in breadth — my interests in philosophy and religious studies, for example. I wouldn’t want to give that up. In retrospect, I would probably have tried to work harder and do both!”

Newsome still remembers many Stetson professors who made an impact on his life and made his research for the BRAIN Initiative possible.

“There were several professors who encouraged me time after time to think for myself, put in the hard work, and place no limits on what I might be able to achieve and contribute in the long run,” he said.

“I think of physics professors like George Jenkins, Tom Lick and Tony Jusick; chemistry professors like Ted Beiler, Jim DeLap and Ken Everett. David Stock was particularly influential from the biology side. Lewis Myers, Rollin Armour and Lafayette Walker enlarged my worldview and enabled me to think critically from the points of view of philosophy and religious studies,” Newsome said.

While reflecting on his time at Stetson, Newsome stated, “These professors and others gave generously of their time and their minds to shape my own emerging mind. I am forever grateful to them.”

By Nicole Melchionda

Note: This article originally appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of Stetson University Magazine. To read the entire magazine, click here. The next issue of the magazine is scheduled for publication this fall.