Official Story
Tanya Sippy got her B.S. in neuroscience at UCLA where for her undergraduate thesis she studied synaptic transmission under the mentorship of Felix Schweizer. After taking a gap year to finish up her research project in the Schweizer lab, Tanya matriculated in Columbia University's MD/PhD program. There, her thesis work in Rafael Yuste's lab focused the role of interneuron subtypes in shaping cortical activity. For her postdoctoral work, Tanya went to the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland where she studied sensorimotor transformation in the basal ganglia. After her postdoc, Tanya completed her clinical training in psychiatry at NYU and stayed at NYU to start her lab in October of 2019. Tanya is the recipient of the Howard Hughes undergraduate research scholar award, the NIH Ruth Kirschstein NRSA, the Burroughs Career Award for Medical Scientists, the Whitehall Grant, and an NIH NINDS R01.
Unofficial Story
Tanya was born in Orange County, California to parents who immigrated from India. From the time she could remember her parents, in typical Indian fashion, ordained that she would become a doctor. But her parents also recognized her love for dance and enrolled her in her first class at age 7. After one class she was hooked and spent the next 14 years more committed to dancing than to her studies, a fact that caused a lot of friction between her and her parents. As a senior in high school, she finished her requirements to graduate early, dropped her AP classes and drove every day after school to a dance studio in North Hollywood (1.5 hours north of the OC) where she was awarded a scholarship meant to train professional dancers (she did all this without her parent's consent or them realizing what she was up to). The tension between her and her parents and her own internal struggle to find her career path culminated when she was a sophomore at UCLA, and letter warning of academic dismissal was sent to her home address and opened by her mother. At that point, Tanya knew she had to make a choice: doctor or dancer?
It didn't happen overnight, but a combination of a solid friendship with a fellow student who was passionate about neuroscience and a gifted organic chemistry professor along with a physical injury steered Tanya in the direction of medicine. To better her chances of medical school admission, she applied to work in research labs at UCLA and was very lucky to work with Felix Schweizer. It didn't take long for her to realize that she was not really a doctor at heart but a scientist. Tanya was quickly persuaded to apply for MD/PhD programs and, having developed an obsession with NYC, she was thrilled to be accepted at Columbia. While medical school was a blast, her thesis years were rocky to say the least, and she was unsure if she would continue in neuroscience after she finished her dual degree.
Ambivalent about what do after graduation, Tanya followed her heart to Europe (more on this later...) Luck was on her side again when Carl Petersen, whose lab was at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, offered her a postdoctoral fellowship. At first, Tanya thought Switzerland might be boring and sterile, but she quickly grew to appreciate the country, its central location in Europe, and the rich resources and keen mentorship the Petersen lab provided; her 21 month postdoc was absolutely incredible both professionally and personally. Rediscovering her passion for science and growing to love European culture put her at another crossroads: should she leave Europe and her postdoc to go back to the States to pursue medical training? Ultimately, residency back in NYC is what she chose but had a hard time not looking back. She still visits the Petersen lab and the EPFL every year to get a dose of fresh Swiss air and energy of the Institute.
Residency in psychiatry did provide Tanya with the training she needed to bring her work more focused on translation. She met Stephen Ross who was starting clinical trials using psilocybin to treat anxiety in cancer patients, and began working with him to broaden the scope of his work to include discussion about brain mechanisms that might be responsible for the therapeutic effects of these drugs. After starting her lab an NYU, she became associate director of a newly found training program in psychedelic medicine and this is now an active area of research in her lab. Almost unconsciously, her main research platform focuses on how learned sensory stimuli guide our ongoing actions, the fundamental biological process that underlies dancing. And where she lives in Manhattan is a stone's throw from the best dance studios in the world enabling dance to continue to play a formative role in her life.