UAB neuroscientist, Mountain Brook resident wins prestigious fellowship

Summer Thyme, a Mountain Brook resident and assistant professor in the UAB Department of Neurobiology, became a neuroscientist because of a definite purpose.

“I went into science specifically because of the potential to make a discovery that could affect millions of people,” Thyme told Village Living.

At UAB, where she joined the faculty in 2019 and runs her own lab, Thyme studies genes linked to neuropsychiatric disorders, including the rare disease of childhood-onset schizophrenia.

She seeks to decipher the molecular and developmental functions of these genes and to help identify potential therapeutics, according to UAB School of Medicine News.

In August, Thyme got a big boost for her efforts.

She was awarded a Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship in neuroscience, becoming UAB’s first recipient of this prestigious fellowship.

The fellowships are given annually to only about a dozen promising young investigators in the first four years of their faculty positions.

Upon hearing she had been chosen, Thyme was “excited, surprised and honored,” she said.

The fellowship is special because it “supports early career researchers taking on exciting and risky projects,” she said.

Traditional funding from governmental sources “tends to be risk-averse and requires a lot of the project to be completed to show feasibility, which can be challenging for a new professor,” Thyme said.

This cutting-edge approach is perfect for Thyme.

“I’ve always been inclined to do science in this way,” she said. “High-risk projects are not all that risky if you are committed to finding away to reach your goal.”

As part of her Klingenstein-Simons project, Thyme seeks to generate new mutants for genes linked to childhood-onset schizophrenia, and her lab makes zebra fish models that harbor the exact genetic variants found in human patients, according to School of Medicine News.

A native of New Hampshire, Thyme holds bachelor’s degrees in biology and one in chemistry from Scripps College.

In 2012, she finished her Ph.D. in Seattle at the University of Washington. She finished her postdoctoral fellowship in 2019 at Harvard University.

She and her family moved to Birmingham in July 2019 and settled in Mountain Brook a few months later.

“We love it here so far,” Thyme said, referring to Mountain Brook. "You can find my family at the Tot Lot, enjoying the amazing botanical gardens or taking walks on the Jemison Park trail.”

She is also grateful to the neurobiology department for being “so supportive” and helping her “achieve so much” in her first year on campus.

“UAB is a great environment to do cutting-edge science,” Thyme said.

Thyme is hopeful that her work at the university with childhood-onset schizophrenia could yield far-reaching dividends.

“Studying this rare disease could provide insight into more common forms of the disorder where the underlying genes are less well-understood,” Thyme said.

Schizophrenia affects about 1% of the population, and other related disorders are also common, she said.

“If we can discover a treatment for these disorders that is even slightly better than what exists, that could relieve suffering for these patients,” Thyme said.

Thyme and her team are also “setting up new pipelines for drug discovery using a high-throughput animal model, the baby zebra fish, and building new computational methods for drug design,” she said.

In addition, Thyme — near the beginning of a promising career — should have no shortage of intriguing challenges ahead of her.

“The brain is one of the most poorly understood organs, and it is clear that we need many decades of research in this area to make progress on treatments for brain disorders,” she said.