FACULTY FEATURE: Jeff Gavornik
As one enters the room on a rainy Monday afternoon, it’s difficult to escape the faint impression of mad science afoot. Papers and folders lay scattered over the floor and work desks in a secret pattern. In front of the spacious window sits a singular Dyson bladeless fan, eternally cool with its space age aesthetic. The whiteboard walls are plastered with various markings – equations, questions, drawings scientific and whimsical – that fill the room with scholarly energy. This is the office of Dr. Jeff Gavornik; and in the middle, tea in hand, sits the man himself.
Dr. Gavornik teaches NE203/BI325: Principles of Neuroscience, one of the core courses for neuroscience students at BU. He currently works as an Assistant Professor of Biology at BU and P.I. of his own Gavornik Lab. However, like most of us, Dr. Gavornik hasn’t always been here; his unique path to BU has been filled with interesting developments and detours. Growing up, his father was a pilot in the Air Force, and so Dr. Gavornik’s childhood was spotted with relocations from Alaska (his birthplace) to Arizona, Texas, Ohio, and back to Texas again. Ultimately, Texas became his ‘home,’ as he spent his high school years there before attending Rice University in the late 90s for undergraduate studies in Electrical & Computer Engineering & History.
While studying at Rice, Dr. Gavornik interned for two stints at MITRE in Bedford, MA, a non-for-profit research and development corporation partnering closely with the federal government. There, he worked on a project concerning acceptance testing for the production of the now well-known Iridium satellite network. His experience proved useful, as while his undergraduate studies were winding down, he was approached by Boeing’s space program for work on their own Iridium-related contract. Unfortunately (or luckily), Boeing’s Iridium contract fell through, and Dr. Gavornik was shifted to work on the International Space Station with NASA.
Of his time there, Dr. Gavornik recalls that “there were very interesting things about it,” including cool technical developments such as a “neat robot arm designed so it could reach over itself, from one part to another part, and sort of inchworm its way across the Space Station.” In addition, the program paid for his Master’s Degree at Rice in Electrical Engineering (2003), which he earned simultaneously. However, the day-to-day tedium proved oppressive. The ISS was an international effort on most levels, he explained, and so it was rife with the inevitable (and painful) sorts of debates and compromises which hinder a project’s tangible progress.
“Meetings and TPS forms, planning, sitting in these really long international meetings… falling asleep for days at a time, while people were arguing about whose responsibility these things should be – the day-to-day stuff wasn’t super exciting,” he said. It didn’t seem to get better either, as he remembers being “surrounded by people who were my age now, and they were doing the exact same stuff I was doing, and I was already sort of getting bored with it.”
Turning away from industry, Dr. Gavornik moved from Houston to attend graduate school at the University of Texas in Austin.
“I didn’t honestly even know what neuroscience was, and didn’t necessarily intend to.” he said. “I applied, and sort of my philosophy was, ‘I’ll take classes broadly, and whatever I think is interesting, I’ll do.’ Because I’d had the other experience of basically doing something I wasn’t super excited about for a job, and so I knew that wasn’t the most fun in the world.”
This approach still netted Dr. Gavornik a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2009, but along the way he found interest in neuroscience, recalling his introductory class in computational neuroscience with particular fondness to this day. After UT, Dr. Gavornik performed postdoctoral research at MIT for five years in what he described as a “pressure-cooker” environment, “where everybody just feels like they’re so wound tight and really have to do well, or the world’s going to end.” It wasn’t until 2015 that he finally made BU his home, due partly to fortuitous circumstance.
He relates:
“You’re sort of at the mercy of who has job applications posted when you’re at the right point in your career to be competitive, and so really the thing that brought me to BU was the fact that they had a position posted at the time I was applying, appropriate for what I was looking for (in systems neuroscience).” Dr. Gavornik said. “If they didn’t have the posting, I could have ended up at Purdue, or wherever. That said, I think it turned out to be a really great place for me, for a variety of reasons. One of them is that BU is really supportive of neuroscience right now as an area of expertise…. From the perspective of someone that’s a faculty member here, it’s great. They want you to do well, there’s real support for doing the experiments, and there’s support for having the equipment necessary.”
Beyond the institutional support, Dr. Gavornik also relishes the overall academic environment at BU.
“It’s a very nice combination, I think, of being a very good university with very good students interested in science, hard workers, but also who seem enthusiastic and happy to be here,” he said. “There’s a lot of places where it’s very smart, and it’s super aggressive. BU, in my experience, is not that way – it’s very smart, and it’s friendly about it.”
Bouncing off his praise of the student environment, we decided to ask Dr. Gavornik what advice he could provide to the students themselves. His answer got into more detail, and emphasized basic principles of scholarship and life in general.
“These things just don’t fall in your lap. You have to actively work for the things you want, and even the things you may not want but are important for you to have. Do the leg work.”
More specifically, he noted the significance of putting yourself out there for networking events, and the importance of having Plans A and B to work towards.
“You have to be realistic. With any sort of job where isn’t going to actually happen.” Correspondingly, even though he left industry for academia, Dr. Gavornik underscored the need to understand the opportunities in industry when considering there are a high number of people interested and technically qualified, unless you are an unusual individual or in unusual circumstances, you might just have to get lucky,” he said.…. “ You have to recognize that there are certain things out of your control, and recognize there’s a certain degree of randomness, and plan for the possibility that what it is that you want to do future with academic goals, or vice versa.
When one talks with Dr. Gavornik about the future itself, however, things become a bit hazier (and brighter). There’s a feeling, he explains, that neuroscience is on the edge of a very productive period resembling that of the physics revolution in the early 1900s, or NASA during its most exciting period of pioneering space exploration.
“In a sense, the entirety of our experience of the world is a consequence of how the neurons in our brain are wired together,” he said. “If we understood how the brain works, then in principle we could understand the entirety of the experience of being human.” What a golden age of scientific discovery that would be.
However, as Dr. Gavornik says, we still struggle to fully understand the function of even the simplest neurological systems, and thus “the big questions like ‘what is the nature of existence as defined by the brain’ are yet to be answered.” To know that these ‘big questions’ still lie as sleeping giants invokes a sense of wonder, and genuine inspiration – they are why Dr. Gavornik says he began studying neuroscience in the first place. Hopefully, the answers will reveal themselves soon.
Writer: Brian Privett
Editors: Emme Enojado, Enzo Plaitano, and Yasmine Sami
