by Liliana Quintanar

 

Cecilia Bouzat was born in 1961 in Bahía Blanca, Argentina, a city at the doors of Patagonia. Born to a family where her father and both grandfathers were medical doctors, Bouzat grew up with her five siblings, climbing build­ings and riding bikes, like any other kid in her neighbor­hood. She always enjoyed reading and going to school.

As she developed a taste for math, physics, chemistry, and biology, it became clear that a major in biochemistry would allow her to stay at the interface of all these disciplines. Bouzat studied at the Universidad Nacional del Sur, where she soon discovered that it was possible to get involved in a research project—right there in her hometown. Her first research adventure had to do with studying the binding site at the mus­carinic receptors, which became a subject for her PhD studies at the Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Bahía Blanca (INIBIBB), an institute that focuses in biochemical research in her hometown, and where she now works as a researcher and the vice-chair.

When Bouzat was 24 years old, charged with a passion for research and a thirst for adventure, she took an opportunity that would be defining for her career. She was a second year graduate student in Argentina, and her brother was studying in the US when she visited him for the summer. She thought during this visit she could take the opportunity to see how it is to do research in the US. With the help of her advisor, she got in touch with Fred J. Sigworth to arrange a visit to his lab at Yale University. After a one day visit, she had no doubt she wanted to learn more about electrophysiology, and thus, a quick sum­mer visit became a fruitful five month research stay, during which she learned the patch clamp technique and fell in love with electrophysiology. Bouzat is very grateful to Sigworth for opening the doors of his lab to a young Latin American student, a gesture that certainly helped her career.

Upon her return to Argentina, she soon invested her recently acquired knowledge to set up the first patch clamp experiment in her home country. However, in spite of such enterprise, after completing her PhD studies, Bouzat found herself jobless in Argentina. Luckily, during her visit to Yale, Bouzat met Steven Sine, who at that time was a postdoctoral fellow in Sigworth’s lab, and had been recently hired at Mayo Clinic. Sine invited her to join his group as a postdoctoral fellow, and this was the start of a fruitful long term collaboration. She moved to Rochester, Minnesota with her husband and 18 month old daughter. Her husband had managed to get a year-long leave of absence from his job in Argentina, and so, the clock started ticking for Bouzat. She knew her time at Mayo Clinic was finite. In a year of hard work, she contributed to setting up the new Sine lab, learned molecular biology, studied the electrophysiol­ogy of nicotinic receptors and their transient expression, and produced five publications. She remembers that year as a very intense experience with many sleepless nights.

Back in Argentina, once again Bouzat was unemployed. In Latin America, support for science is not consistently in the political agenda of governments. The opening of new faculty positions at public universities is highly dependent on economical and political factors outside of the control of the academic com­munity. In 1993, there were no faculty or research positions open, so Bouzat took on a job as a teaching assistant at the university, with a salary that was much lower than the salary she paid her babysitter in Argentina. But she did not give up on research. Twice a year, she would escape for three to four weeks to do experiments in Sine´s lab. These visits meant a lot of sacrifice, as she had to leave her daughter and baby son behind in Argentina. Her husband and mother were always very supportive and helped in these situations. Finally, in 1997, research positions opened at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET) and Bouzat won one of them and became a research member of CONICET.

Research funding in Latin America is very scarce, but given her academic excellence, Bouzat has won several international grants, including a Fogarty International Center grant with Sine that allowed her to set up her electrophysiology lab. Ten years after she started her independent career, Cecilia won a L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science fellowship in Argentina. In 2014, she won the international version of this award; a distinction for scientific excellence that is awarded yearly to five women, one from each region of the world: Africa & the Arab States, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Latin America, and North America. She won this distinction for the Latin American region, for her studies on Cys-loop receptors, which play a key role in the central nervous system and its com­munication with muscles. Her research focuses on under­standing how these receptors mediate rapid responses in the nerve cells and their modulation by different drugs. This information is useful to understand the molecular basis of different diseases where the expression of these receptors is diminished, such as Alzheimer´s disease and schizophrenia.

Bouzat is now recognized as an international leader in neu­rotransmitter pharmacology. She is also professor of pharma­cology at the National University of the South in Bahia Blanca. She feels very proud that she has successfully developed a scientific career in her home country, close to her family. Scientists in Latin America face the great challenge of doing research under very unstable conditions. “You never know if the economy will be stable, if the parity dollar-peso will go up, making it impossible to purchase the laboratory supplies and equipment that you need,” she explains. Nonetheless, she finds a positive aspect of working under such conditions, with limited reagents and supplies, which often take a long time to be imported and delivered: “You learn to be more organized, to foresee things, and it helps develop creativity; you learn to make home-made equipment or adaptations of what you have.” Bouzat’s advice to younger female scientists is to devote themselves to what they like, with passion and commitment, to seek academic excellence, and to never give up because, she says, “We need women in science.”