FLAG Researcher Spotlight: Dr Dione Henare
Dr Dione Henare
“I dabbled in a lot of different disciplines through my undergraduate degree and ended up here just by following the things that I found the most interesting.”
Please tell us who you are, your institution and your title
Dr Dion Henare, Senior Lecturer, Auckland University of Technology
How did you become interested in neuroscience?
Like many kids growing up through the 90’s watching Free Wily and Flipper, I went through primary school convinced I was going to be a marine biologist. My interest in science (especially biology) held all through high school and then when I started University, I decided to take psychology because it was something new. Psychology turns out to be an incredibly broad discipline, and I tended to be drawn to the biological end – how does the brain produce the mind. We know so little about this, so it was an exciting idea to me that there was so much left to discover. Through my postgraduate studies I found my niche in the field of cognitive neuroscience, trying to understand the neural mechanisms underlying visual attention and distraction. I dabbled in a lot of different disciplines through my undergraduate degree and ended up here just by following the things that I found the most interesting. Ultimately I found my interest in neuroscience because I had parents who encouraged me to embrace my curiosity, and who could support me to do all of this dabbling.
What are you currently working on? And what is the most exciting part about your current research?
Well, I spent a few years in Germany for my postdoctoral work, very focused on investigating how our everyday experiences shape the reflexes that determine what captures our attention. Since returning to Aotearoa, I have been able to connect this to a few different lines of work that are underway with some really great collaborators, from how this relates to sensory sensitivities in people with traumatic brain injury, to how these processes are impacted by the consumption of kava.
One really exciting project that I’m focused on right now is my Marsden Fast-Start, which builds on the work from my postdoc. While we spent a lot of time developing tasks that create new attentional biases in participants, and measuring the effect of these biases on neural processing at a later time, we hadn’t yet started to look into how these tasks embed biases in the brain. This is what my Fast-Start is aimed at addressing. I think some of the newer machine learning techniques that are being embraced by the field, could offer a novel way of measuring the biases that are built into the brain. My project aims to see whether we can detect the existence of these biases hidden in the structure of the brain, even when they are not explicitly activated by a task or stimulus. While we have some promising data, it’s still early days so I’m very excited to see where this goes!
How have you dealt with any obstacles you have faced in your research?
For me, the solution to problems and obstacles has been to have a good network of friends and colleagues that you can lean on and talk to. My biggest obstacles have always been the ones I’ve only just found out about, and they shrink rapidly as I get more perspectives on them. Also, having other things in your life that you can go and do outside of research. I feel like there’s still a romanticised image of a lone genius, whiling away at their research morning, noon, and night, which is kind of toxic. Sometimes, you need to talk to the person who understands and has been there before, and sometimes, you just need to drop your research problem and walk away for a while.
If people want to contact you to collaborate or discuss your work, how should they do so?
The easiest way is probably just to send me an email (dion.heanre@aut.ac.nz). I’m always happy to talk about potential collaboration, and I have funding for a PhD student available at the moment, so I’m especially interested in hearing from anyone who would like information about that!
Interviewed by: Dr Sam Guy (AUT)