Jason Lunden was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome while doing a PhD in neuroscience. Now a postdoc at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he conducts research on stress in mice that exhibit autism-like behaviours.

What was it like to go through primary school without a clinical diagnosis?

Credit: Nick Romanenko/Rutgers Univ.

I was late to talk, and I could be scatterbrained. I was placed in special-education classes to help me with reading, and I was bullied. Everything changed in high school, when a teacher showed me how to solve an algebra equation. I went from working on long division to doing advanced calculus in less than three years, and I got top scores in honours courses. The Asperger's diagnosis did not exist until 1994, but I didn't seek out a diagnosis until after that.

Where did you go to college?

I began my undergraduate degree in 1995 at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, as a pre-medical major. But I was overwhelmed by the cut-throat competition. I had trouble completing courses and struggled with the focus on research rather than on teaching. In 2000, I transferred to New York's Rochester Institute of Technology. It had a smaller biology department, centred solely on teaching undergraduates. I was much happier. I took a neuroscience course and wrote a paper on the biology of depression, and I got very excited by the idea that you could connect chemistry with psychology. In my mind, that was the most exciting science happening at the moment.

Was it difficult to get into a PhD programme?

Yes. I didn't have any research experience. First, I got into a master's programme at California State University, Los Angeles. I worked with a research group that found that exercise in rats increases production of messenger RNA for a protein involved in neuronal development, to levels similar to antidepressant treatment. Ultimately, I got into a PhD programme at Temple University Medical School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where I worked on drug addiction. We showed that a decrease in serotonin levels could theoretically regress people who had made it through drug withdrawal back into a withdrawal-like state (D. R. Staub et al. Psychoneuroendocrinology 37, 859–870; 2012).

How did you start doing work on autism?

When I was finishing my PhD, I looked for people doing autism research and found Emanuel DiCicco-Bloom. I sent him an e-mail expressing interest in his work. We met at a Society for Neuroscience meeting and kept in contact online for a couple of years. His autism mouse model showed signs not only of decreased sociability but also of physiological symptoms of depression, which is estimated to affect 30–37% of adolescents with autism. I wanted to use his model to study other parts of the brain circuit.

How did your experience influence your research?

I suffered from depression, like many on the spectrum. Research has shown that if kids with autism are at a playground with kids without it, their cortisol levels shoot up. I wanted to understand the neural circuitry related to sadness.

What are your career goals?

I hope to go into teaching and possibly do some research with students. I received a US National Institutes of Health Institutional Research and Academic Career Development Award, and I have a mentor from a teaching college. I spend 70% of my time doing research and 30% learning to teach. I don't see myself going through the complexities of fighting for grants at a research university.

What made you want to be a teacher?

There is a personal motivation. If I hadn't had that one-on-one experience with the teacher who taught me how to do algebra, I might not have a PhD now. I hate to lock into the stereotype, but when Hans Asperger first described this disorder, he called sufferers 'little professors who wouldn't stop talking about their special interests'. If I am on a train with a random stranger, I will tell them all about my research. What better job for me to have than to do that in a more formal way?

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.