Official Story
Heather McKellar earned her Ph.D. in Cellular, Molecular, and Biophysical Studies from Columbia University and her B.A. in Biology from Boston University. During her graduate training she helped start the Columbia University Neuroscience Outreach Group, which led to the 2011 Next Generation Award from the Society for Neuroscience. She joined the Neuroscience Institute in September 2011, about a month after its official start date, as an admin assistant supporting two labs. Heather founded the Neuroscience Outreach Group at NYU (NOGN) in 2011 and hosted the first NYU Community Brain Fair during Brain Awareness Week 2012. Her interest in outreach also led her to serve as the President of the Greater New York Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience (braiNY) from 2015-2018 and continue as a member of its executive board. When Nina Gray became the Administrative Director in 2013, Heather took over the management of the graduate program and numerous projects in the areas of community engagement. This past June she was promoted to be the third Executive Director of the Neuroscience Institute, working closely with Dick Tsien and overseeing a team of 12 staff members.
Unofficial Story
Heather was born and raised in a small town in the northwest corner of Connecticut. She learned to love education and bureaucracy (kidding) from her special-education-teacher mom and state-employee dad. Heather was an incredibly shy child who learned about imposter syndrome early when she attended an elite boarding school as a day student. But, she also found her love of science in the school's state-of-the-art classroom labs where she dissected her first fetal pig and applied for her first fellowship. Heather went to Boston University as a way to broaden her horizons and escape small town CT for the city. It wasn't until she got into a lab the summer before her junior year that she truly settled on neuroscience as her major. After graduation she didn't have a plan until a friend convinced her to move to NYC, so she sent a bunch of letters (by mail!) and received an offer to be a technician with Rae Silver at Columbia. After not getting into the neuroscience graduate program at Columbia, Rae Silver saw promise (or took pity) in her and helped her application find its way to the Integrated Program. Unfortunately, that is where she slowly realized that lab life was not for her. A fellow student dragged her to an outreach classroom visit as a way to recharge, and she became hooked. Heather helped organize the early stages of the Columbia University Neuroscience Outreach Group and made the connections with the Greater New York Chapter of the Society for Neuroscience (braiNY), the New York Academy of Sciences, and Dana Foundation that led to her job with NYU and her role as President of braiNY. At the end of graduate school, she realized that outreach could be a career when her friend was named Director of Neuroscience Outreach at Columbia's new Zuckerman Institute. She emailed Rob Froemke and Gord Fishell, who were scientific connections with her lab, and her letter ended up on the desk of the new Executive Director who convinced her to come on as an admin assistant who would have spare time to run an outreach program. Heather quickly took on more and more and more tasks and projects in her role. This past May, she started her new role as Executive Director and is still learning the ins and outs. In her free time, Heather loves to cook with her fiancé, have wine nights with her friends from Columbia that are a wonderful and supportive network, and do arts and crafts with her nieces and nephew. She relies on outreach and her volunteer positions to recharge and her favorite item in her office remains the plastinated human brain.