Neuroscience researcher earns University of Cincinnati doctorate while teaching full-time

When the new school year begins, students and teachers alike often share what they did during summer vacation as a way to get to know one another.

When Julia Hoyda went back to her science classroom at Cincinnati Classical Academy, she could tell her students she published neuroscience research in an academic journal and successfully defended her doctoral dissertation this summer.

Hoyda worked full-time as a science teacher for the last two years of her doctoral neuroscience program at the University of Cincinnati and says the combination of research and teaching has made her a better science communicator and fueled her passion to continue educating the next generation of scientists.

Choosing UC

Hoyda grew up in the Chicago area and was interested in how the brain works from an early age.

“I have an older brother who has autism and a seizure disorder, and so from a really young age I just wanted to know how the brain worked and was really fascinated with how his brain was different from my brain,” Hoyda said. “It wasn’t until high school into college when I realized I could do something with that and get a degree in that, turn it into a career.”

After earning a bachelor’s degree in biology from Hillsdale College, Hoyda looked for doctoral neuroscience programs where she could research speech and language through neuroimaging of human subjects. That led her to UC, where she began her doctoral studies in 2018 under the mentorship of Jennifer Vannest, PhD, professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders in UC’s College of Allied Health Sciences.

“There’s certainly a place for animal models and cell line research and all of that, but I knew I wanted to do something that was uniquely human, and speech and language is certainly that,” Hoyda said. “It’s what makes us human.”

Shifting gears

The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically altered Hoyda’s plans, especially when research on human subjects shut down for more than a year. She shifted to two different research projects than she originally planned, but needed an additional job to supplement the loss in funding due to the pandemic.

Hoyda saw a job posting for a middle school science teacher at Cincinnati Classical Academy, which uses curriculum from Hillsdale, her alma mater.

“I thought that’s something I could probably do,” she said. “So I interviewed, got hired, and I’ve loved every minute of it. It’s certainly a lot of work to do that and write a dissertation at the same time, but it’s some of the most rewarding work that I’ve ever done.”

Hoyda said writing a dissertation and reading scientific papers gave her a better view of how to explain how research works and is written about in practice to her students. She encourages them to think about how to communicate results of experiments efficiently and effectively.

“It’s good to do small-step projects, like testing different kinds of fertilizers on different plants, when you’re in middle school,” she said. “But I try to get students used to the language that you use when writing a scientific paper through writing lab reports, even a rudimentary understanding of statistics, of how we know whether our results were significant or not.”

At the same time, teaching her students every day has made Hoyda more confident in breaking down complex information and communicating her research results.

“During my dissertation defense, they said that my presentation skills have remarkably increased since the last time we had met, and I think that’s due to teaching,” Hoyda said. “When you have to get up every day and present something and explain it, you hopefully get good at it.”

Publishing research

Hoyda and colleagues recently published research in the journal Brain Imaging and Behavior that examined how connections between areas of the brain correlate with speech and language difficulties for children ages 8 to 12.

The study looked at typical speakers and children with a range of difficulties in both structural language — which includes syntax, semantics, grammar and mispronunciations — and pragmatic language — which includes emotional context, understanding social cues and the rhythmic component of language.

“I wanted to look at both structural and pragmatic language difficulties within this population and see how that related to their resting state connectivity within the neural networks in the brain that are related to language processing,” Hoyda explained. “There is actually a good deal of research that shows the brain has spontaneous neural activity when at rest that is believed to be reinforcing pathways that it uses throughout the day.”

Children with difficulties in structural and pragmatic language had increased connectivity to regions in the right hemisphere of the brain, a somewhat surprising finding, as language is thought to primarily be processed in the left hemisphere.

Looking across children with language difficulties and typical speakers, Hoyda said an increase in structural language skills was correlated with increased connectivity between the left fusiform gyrus, known for its role in facial recognition and visual wordforms, and the right superior temporal gyrus. 

Increased connectivity between the cerebellum and regions in the right hemisphere were also correlated with increased structural language skills, while connectivity between the cerebellum and left hemisphere regions was correlated with increased pragmatic language skills.

“The cerebellum is bringing all that motor and sensory information in, making sense of it and then putting it back out,” Hoyda said. “So it kind of makes sense then that this would be involved in language processing, because you have both a sensory receptive component of language and you have a productive component of language as well.”

Hoyda said language difficulties will still practically be diagnosed by behavioral data, but the knowledge on brain connectivity provides more information on how language relates to brain functioning.

“Human language is so complex that it can only be studied in humans,” she said. “Eventually, it could help to know the language networks well enough to say these are the common problems if someone has an injury in this area of the brain. Here’s the type of therapy we know strengthens that connection and builds those areas that were damaged. And that’s how I imagine long term what that would look like.”

Looking ahead

As a newly minted PhD, Hoyda said she’d like to continue her research by looking at longitudinal data of how children’s language difficulties and neural connections change over time. She is also working to publish another part of her doctoral research looking at language difficulties for children who were born prematurely.

For now, Hoyda is focused on the lesson plans, grading and relationship building that comes with a new school year. Hoyda is teaching seventh grade science and freshman biology as she begins her third year of teaching. 

It wasn’t her original goal when she began her doctoral program, but Hoyda has grown to love teaching and plans to continue for the foreseeable future. 

“At one point, I remember describing to my dissertation advisors that I wanted to be able to explain complex scientific methods and procedures and concepts to a scientifically lay audience, and I don’t know why I didn’t think of the word ‘teaching,’ because that’s exactly what teaching is,” she said. “It’s cool to be able to know the logical series of events, to understand a concept, to walk someone else through it and watch the lightbulb go off when they get it.”