It Runs in the Family

“They’re a little competitive when they play,” jokes Diane Youngstrom, who stands next to her sister Kay as they watch their parents from the porch of their family home in Chapel Hill.

A snap sounds, and Eric leans over the Carolina blue Ping-Pong table, extending his arm as far as possible to smack the ball back toward his wife, Jen, who laughs. The girls launch into a story about how their parents met in college and, after moving in together in graduate school, the only surface in their house was a Ping-Pong table, which they would cover with a tablecloth for meals.

“Mom is better than dad,” Diane whispers.

Table tennis isn’t the only tradition in the Youngstrom home. Science is another. The family has spent numerous meals around their real kitchen table, tossing around all sorts of topics from bipolar disorder, to sleep science, to global health care access. Just another game — and science is the ball.

The Youngstroms are a family of researchers, and they have lived in Chapel Hill since 2006, when Eric and Jen took a faculty positions in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. While Eric focuses on developing assessment tools for bipolar and mood disorders, Jen works to apply that knowledge as a clinical psychologist within the UNC Psychology and Neuroscience Community Clinic.

“Jen’s my reality fairy,” Eric jokes. “She’s the person who makes sure my research works in the real world.”

They’ve co-authored about 50 papers and have presented their work together at more than 100 conferences. And their daughters are just as engaged in their own research endeavors.

Diane recently graduated from UNC with highest honors in chemistry and just began a new job as a neuroscience researcher at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. Kay, a chemistry and statistics double-major, is entering her junior year and is actively engaged in two projects: one focuses on alleviating the auditory deficiencies experienced by people with autism and the other addresses the legal and ethical barriers of enrolling adolescents in HIV research.

While Diane and Kay’s research interests sometimes collide with their parents’, their ultimate goals are vastly different. Diane is fascinated by basic science and spent her last few years at UNC working in a traditional wet lab analyzing proteins within the tissue of brain models of Alzheimer’s disease. Most recently, Kay has been doing statistical analysis for Med Aditus, a Triangle-based nonprofit focused on increasing access to high-quality affordable medicines in Sub-Saharan Africa.

“As Diane and I have grown up, we’ve blossomed into individual researchers — with different research interests from each other and our parents,” Kay shares. “I love bouncing ideas off each other.  Sometimes they suggest angles to problems that I never would have thought to use. Our minds are all broadened by the intellectual conversations we have, which are often at dinner or in the car.”

Research talk

One of those conversations took place on Diane’s college tour in spring 2016, when the girls were about 15 and 17 years old. Diane and Kay asked their parents what they’d been teaching in their classes. Eric explained that for several years he’d been giving out an extra credit survey with questions about personality, creativity, and mood to both students at UNC and Korea University — and that he felt he had enough responses to start looking at statistical trends.

“And then the girls started asking questions,” Eric says. “So I grabbed a napkin and began jotting stuff down.”

At this time, the Youngstroms had spent seven summers in South Korea, where Eric and Jen teach psychology courses at Korea University. With years of cultural experiences under their belt, Diane and Kay helped Eric and Jennifer shape the questions into testable hypotheses during the car ride home to North Carolina. Then, Eric ran the analyses and printed out the results — most of which were the opposite of what the Youngstroms had predicted.

Together, the entire family developed and co-authored a series of posters — each one covering a different topic including mental health stigma, depression and suicide, and mood disorders — to display at the North Carolina Psychological Association conference. The following year, Kay and Diane replicated the results, which Kay presented at a national conference in New York City.

“Dad definitely did not toss us a bone to make this an easy research experience,” Kay says. “He made us work for it. But it was interesting to see and apply the knowledge of how we, as outsiders, observed South Korea throughout the years.”

“It was fun to take those observations that we thought we were having and try to quantify them scientifically,” Diane says. “That was kind of my first taste of research — diving into that data set with my dad, him guiding me through the hypotheses and data collection, using stats programs to analyze it, and then presenting that information. It was a beautiful arc and made me hungry for more.”

Lab allure

While Diane enjoyed working on the psychology surveys, she discovered a love for chemistry and wet labs after taking a class in high school — and decided to major in the subject at UNC. In 2018, the summer after her first year of college, she returned to South Korea with her parents to intern in a neuroscience lab at Seoul National University, where she began staining human brain tissue to identify proteins in the cells.

“That was really cool,” says Diane, chuckling.

After returning to Carolina, Diane joined the Child Imaging Research on Cognition and Life Experiences (CIRCLE) Lab ran by UNC psychologist Margaret Sheridan. She began working on the Youth Emotion Study, a research project exploring how stressful life experiences affect brain development in adolescent girls.

“Have you ever watched ‘CSI’ and seen those full, beautiful, rainbow-y brain images? Well I got a taste of how that works behind the scenes — and it takes months to build that image, called an fMRI,” Diane says. “It’s a lot of data processing, and I helped with that.”

But, like before, she missed the wet lab. And, like the agents in CSI, began doing some sleuthing of her own. After spending some time peeling through faculty web pages, she stumbled upon the lab of Graham Diering, a sleep and neuroscience researcher at UNC, and emailed him to learn more about his work. By the end of their first meeting, he offered Diane a spot in his lab.

Diane spent her last two years at Carolina studying how sleep disruption in early life contributes to brain diseases like Alzheimer’s. Using cell cultures, she created models of the inflammation found in the brains of patients with the disease, observing the various protein changes that occur to try to pinpoint the events that reduce learning and memory. She has also helped with experiments looking at how neurons communicate and how brain chemistry changes during sleep deprivation.

Global perspective

While Kay is also a chemistry major, her research goals differ from Diane’s and have been largely shaped by her family’s travels. Beyond South Korea, she’s visited more than 40 other countries.

“I have had the unique experience of seeing some of the best and some of the worst medical systems in the world,” Kay says. “And I think that what I want to do is take some of the best aspects from all these different systems and try to improve access to quality medical care.”