Fellows-to-Faculty Awardee Sama Ahmed Studies the Neuroscience of Multitasking

Portrait of smiling Sama Ahmed walking outside the University of Washington. — In 2021, Sama Ahmed received the Simons Foundation’s Fellows-to-Faculty Award to establish his lab at the University of Washington. Tara Brown for Simons Foundation

As a postdoctoral fellow, Sama Ahmed carefully considered not only his research program, but also the dynamic he wanted to foster in his future lab. In 2021, he received a Fellows-to-Faculty Award from the Simons Foundation, which provided $600,000 and community support to help him navigate the challenge of establishing his lab at the University of Washington. There, his lab focuses on the neurobiology of multitasking. Ahmed recently shared his experience with us and explained how starting a lab is an opportunity to re-envision the power structure of science.

How did you become interested in starting your own lab?

One thing that definitely sticks out to me is that I had a fantastic undergraduate advisor. I worked in a lab in Philadelphia at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, doing taste psychophysics with Paul Breslin. I think I just looked at what he was doing, and I was like, “I want to do that. He’s having a good time. I’m having a good time. I want to just keep doing this.”

There’s just something really appealing about the job. Even with all its stressors, it’s still quite a joy and a privilege to be able to do this work.

Your lab studies the neurobiology of multitasking. Could you please describe your work?

You can put all the questions we’re driven to answer under this idea that, while brains are capable of quite a lot, some things are impossible for them. You can think of multitasking as a way of testing the limits of what the brain can do. There’s a lot of amazing work in cognitive psychology on multitasking in humans, much of which relates to day-to-day experience, right? Don’t text and drive.

But I don’t think humans are unique. So we started looking at this in the fly system, because the fly has a bunch of interesting, charismatic behaviors, some of which co-occur. For instance, during courtship, the male fly will run around while singing to the female fly by extending one of his wings and vibrating it. These are two separate behaviors that he can combine, because these two things don’t need to happen together, but they do during courtship displays. So we started looking at this as an example of multitasking and found a lot of interesting interactions between these two separate motor programs, walking and singing. That’s how I got my lab started.

Portrait of Sama Ahmed inside his lab at the University of Washington. — Ahmed at work in his lab at the University of Washington. Tara Brown for Simons Foundation

How did you become interested in the limits of cognition?

When I started my postdoc in Mala Murthy’s lab, I was really interested in how the long-term state, for example, how you are in the morning versus the afternoon, might change how you behave on a moment-by-moment basis, which lends itself to this idea that there are things happening simultaneously all the time. That’s where the kernel got its start, it was really to try to make sense of animal behavioral variability.

Then Mala encouraged me to also think about state as a local phenomenon, like, what are you doing in this moment? If you’re walking, how does that constrain whether you can talk or not talk? Once I started thinking about this question, it naturally took me to multitasking.

How has this award shaped the broader research direction of your lab?

The award came through the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain (SCGB), which aims to map the neural processes and circuitry behind cognition, and that marked a real sea change in how neuroscientists across systems think about the brain — not just as collections of interacting parts, but as networks whose global dynamics are fundamentally important. My lab has embraced this perspective, using it to frame how we study the interdependent roles of single neurons and neural populations in shaping behavior.

Sama Ahmed in his lab with a Ph.D. student. — Ahmed works with a doctoral student in his lab. Tara Brown for Simons Foundation

What was the biggest challenge you faced transitioning from a postdoc to faculty member?

There were many challenges. One that comes to mind is just starting a lab, I felt like my first three months, I aged five years. You don’t know what you’re doing because the training you’ve received has been mostly about the work, the science, and less about the things that you do as a faculty member, like managing a teaching load and a budget and running a team. It all comes at once. There’s no slow ramp up.

How did the fellowship aid your development as a scientist?

The importance of financial support can’t be understated, especially nowadays, but you’re also tapped into this new community.

To have your work taken seriously is quite validating. When I was thinking about the fly system as a model for multitasking, I wasn’t 100 percent clear that this was the right approach. Having some serious scientists who could see the potential in that perspective had a really positive impact on my motivation.

When I was applying for a position, I asked, “What’s the thing that you didn’t know?” I got a lot of different answers. And one of the one of my mentors said, “The job is pretty lonely as a PI. You become a PI, and you have your own office, and you’re writing a lot of the time.” Having the fellowship meant that I was not the only one experiencing this. I had other people going through it at the same time.

There’s a lot of work that goes into being a scientist that is not setting up the best controlled experiment. Being able to commiserate and get feedback from other people, share your ideas and having a community of folks at your level — that horizontal, peer transfer of information is really key.

Portrait of Sama Ahmed in his office at the University of Washington. — Ahmed sits in his office at the University of Washington. Tara Brown for Simons Foundation

Tell me a little bit about what was important to you as you established your lab?

One of the most fun parts about being a PI is that you get to actually create the structure that allows for the best science to happen in your lab. Everyone has a different approach, there’s no single way to do it. That realization freed me to be experimental.

When I was a postdoc and knew I was going to be starting my lab, I had an extra year to think about what I wanted to do with my group. I started thinking a lot about how power navigates in academia.

I found this really wonderful video of someone who studies power, and they talked about how important hierarchies are if you need something to happen quickly. But if you want things to be done in a way that has more buy in, you want a flatter structure. You want more collaboration. You want more consensus building. That process is significantly slower, but you end up doing science in a different way, in my opinion.

What does that mean for your lab?

If things need to move really quickly, we collapse onto a hierarchical structure. I can give you lots of examples when the person at the top was not me. But if we want to be a little bit more discerning and imaginative, we move toward a flatter structure, and that’s led to really creative outcomes for us.

People enjoy the science and want to come in and work together. That’s super important to me. I had a great time when I was an undergrad doing research, and I just wanted that feeling in this group as well.

Is there anything else you’d like people to know about the fellowship?

If you’re considering applying, contact the program officers and pitch them your ideas and pay attention to what they say. People may have strong ideas, but they may not be aligned with the program’s mission. So, before you get too deep into writing a full proposal, it’s a good idea to talk to the program officers. I don’t think a lot of postdocs know that. I surely did not.