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Student and Faculty Profiles

Meet Dr. Richard Mains...

Department of Neuroscience
Professor of Neuroscience

I came to molecular and cellular neuroscience by a very circuitous route. I was an engineer as an undergraduate, specifically a civil engineer at Brown University (bridges, sewers, retaining walls) but did not like it. I had taught homework sections all through my undergraduate time, and really enjoyed the teaching; I planned to get a Ph.D. and never work in a lab again, only teaching. I started in graduate school at Harvard in biomedical engineering, since back then one could not even get an application to apply to a neurobiology or physiology program, with “only” an engineering background. In the course of one year in graduate school, I went through three programs, going via biophysics to neurobiology.

I intended to do electrophysiology, recording action potentials and synaptic potentials, to stick with the only kind of experimentation I had a chance to understand (having no introductory biology, biochemistry, whatever to my credit). But my neurons grown in culture were not cooperating – they did not make synapses and “talk to each other”. The lab across the hall had just established a cool method to investigate neurotransmitter synthesis, using radioactive precursors and paper electrophoresis at 6000 volts in a tank cooled by kerosene! That lab requested my blessing before turning on their new apparatus, so I asked to learn how to use it also, since maybe my neurons were not making the right neurotransmitters (they were not). Five years later I had a Ph.D. thesis based entirely on biochemistry, and never looked back.

Then off to a postdoctoral position in Oregon and the opportunity to get into the new area of biochemical endocrinology, and to work with Betty Eipper (my wife). Next to assistant and associate professor positions in physiology at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center for eight years, where a non-existent Ph.D. program was brought to life, and where I learned about medical and dental teaching firsthand, doing all of gastrointestinal physiology, parts of the endocrinology curriculum, and a mandatory hands-on lab in endocrinology – we taught separate physiology courses for medical, dental, med-tech, and dental hygienists.

Then off to the new Neuroscience Department at Johns Hopkins as full professors, to do more research and to start that Graduate Program in 1983. By 2000, it was clear that Johns Hopkins had been a great place to expand a career, just as Colorado had been a wonderful place to start an independent career, but there was a nagging need to do more in teaching and in mentoring younger faculty, at an institution that valued teaching. The opportunity to help start the Neuroscience Department at the UConn Health Center came at the right moment, so we made the leap. The Graduate Program is reorganized, with an NIH training grant, and now some of the medical/dental teaching has been modified. Teaching along with research remain my scientific passions.