Draft:Mary E. Harrington

Mary E. Harrington
Alma mater	Pennsylvania State University (B.S., 1980), University of Toronto (M.A., 1982), Dalhousie University (Ph.D., 1986)
Scientific career
Fields	Chronobiology
Thesis	Behavioral, anatomical and physiological studies of the geniculo-suprachiasmatic tract in the golden hamster

Mary E. Harrington

Mary E. Harrington is an American chronobiologist who is famous for her research in Neuropeptide Y (NPY), the Ventral Lateral Geniculate Nucleus (vLGN), and the Intergeniculate Leaflet(IGL) in mammals. She is the chair of Neuroscience program and Tippit Professor in the Life Sciences at Smith College and also the Editor-in-Chief for the Journal of Biological Rhythms (JBR).

Early Life and Background

Early Life and Education

Mary E. Harrington grew up in Valparaiso, Indiana, where she attended Valparaiso High School. Harrington currently resides in Northampton, Massachusetts. She earned her Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Pennsylvania State University in 1980, followed by a Master of Arts in Psychology from the University of Toronto in 1982. She completed her Ph.D. in Psychology at Dalhousie University in 1986. Her dissertation was titled "Behavioral, anatomical and physiological studies of the geniculo-suprachiasmatic tract in the golden hamster."

Teaching History

After completing her Ph.D., Mary Harrington conducted postdoctoral research at Dalhousie University from 1986 to 1987, working with Dr. Benjamin Rusak. In 1987, she joined Smith College as an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology. She was promoted to associate professor in 1995 and became a full professor in 2003. In 2005, she was appointed as the Tippet Professor in the Life Sciences. Since 2023, Harrington has served as Director of the Neuroscience Program at Smith College. She credits herself with inspiring many students to pursue neuroscience as a major.

Beyond her tenure at Smith College, Harrington has been a member of the Neuroscience and Behavior Program at University of Massachusetts at Amherst (UMass Amherst) since 1987, and an adjunct member at UMass Amherst’s Center for Neuroendocrine Studies since 2000.

Key Contributions

Research and Findings

In 1986, Harrington published her Ph.D thesis, “Behavioral, anatomical and physiological studies of the geniculo-suprachiasmatic tract in the golden hamster” at Dalhousie University.

In 1986, Mary Harrington visited Patricia J. DeCoursey’s lab as a postdoc and spent several months setting her up to conduct immunocytochemical studies. DeCoursey was a pioneer female scientist in chronobiology for years, especially for defining the phase response curve. In the studies during the 1997 season, they observed a predator, likely a weasel, killing the SCN-lesion chipmunks.

Currently, Harrington’s lab and her research focuses on chronobiology and how to slow early progression of Alzheimer’s dementia. Some research areas from her lab include:

• Exercise helps restore aged circadian rhythms (Leise et al, 2013).

• Circadian Plasticity: Exercise (via Neuropeptide Y) can alter responses to light and impact neural circuits (Yannielli Harrington 2004; Yannielli et al, 2004).
• Drug development to help chronic jetlag (Kessler et al, 2008).
• How chronic disruptions can alter the brain clock (Leise et al, 2020).
• How the body organs can lose their sync with the sun cycles following chronic circadian disruptions (Davidson et al 2009; Smith et al, 2022).

Currently, her most cited paper is “The ventral lateral geniculate nucleus and the intergeniculate leaflet: interrelated structures in the visual and circadian systems”, with 449 citations. Her most recent impactful publication is "Keeping an eye on circadian time in clinical research and medicine" with 65 citations so far.

Teaching and Conferences

Besides the role as a researcher, Harrington empowers students to become future scientists. She teaches about neuroanatomy, sensory systems, Alzheimer’s disease, and experimental methods in neuroscience and is open to include undergraduate researchers in her lab. Harrington is also vocal about the general science community which she participated in SfN Annual meeting 2016 and advocated "Optimizing Experimental Design for High-Quality Science".

Scholarly Lectures and Presentations

Dr. Mary Harrington has been invited to speak at multiple national and international conferences, symposiums, and academic institutions since 2013. Her lectures span topics such as the biology of circadian rhythms, neuroscience, fatigue, and more. She has delivered keynote addresses and panel contributions at events like the Gordon Research Conference on Chronobiology, the Society for Neuroscience, and the Canadian Society for Chronobiology. Additionally, Harrington contributes to educational programming by engaging with undergraduate students and the public on topics like sleep, memory, and the biology of fatigue. Her talks reflect her scientific expertise and dedication to advancing research in the fields of chronobiology and neuroscience.

Organizational Involvements

In 2020, Harrington became the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Biological Rhythms, sponsored by the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms (SRBR). Harrington is also part of the program Community 4 Rigor, an NIH funded project to improve rigor in science. She believed that working against bias is the key for scientific research.

Writer and Editor

Harrington is always passionate about writing. She had published her textbook “The Design of Experiments in Neuroscience” in 2005 and it is now updated to the 3rd edition. Beyond academic writing, she is also a poet passionate about the beauty of nature. She published her first poem on JBR named “Feedback”, which is also the first poem ever in a scientific journal. In 2001, Harrington was inspired by Gonyaulax and wrote down this poem:

Poem: Feedback -- Mary Harrington (2001)

If the lazy dinoflagellate

should lay abed

refuse to photosynthesize,

realize:

the clock will not slow

but it will grow fait

    weaker

        weaker

barely whispering at the end

    “rise”

        “rise”

to little effect.

The recalcitrant Gonyaulax

arms crossed

snorts

“No longer will

they call my life

(my life!)

‘just hands’.

I am sticking to the sea bed!

Awards and Honors

Dr. Mary Harrington is a leading researcher actively engaged in both academia and social initiatives. She is a member of Phi Beta Kappa, Psi Chi, Sigma Xi, one of the most prestigious international honor societies in psychology. During her graduate studies, she received multiple fellowships. At the University of Toronto, where she earned her master's degree in psychology (1891–1892), she was a recipient of the Connaught Fellowship. She later pursued a doctorate in psychology at Dalhousie University (1982–1986), researching on the "Behavioral, anatomical, and physiological studies of the geniculo-suprachiasmatic tract in the golden hamster," and was awarded with the Killam Fellowship.

In 1994, Harrington won the Research Career Development Award by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant in recognition of her contributions as an early-career investigator. She joined Smith College as an assistant professor in 1987 and became a Fellow of the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience in 2003. In 2005, she was appointed Tippit Professor in the Life Sciences at Smith College. Her contributions to neuroscience research and inspiring future scientists led to her presidency of the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience in 2007, the same year she received the Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching. In 2022, she was awarded the Society for Research on Biological Rhythm (SRBR) Director’s Award for Service in recognition of her contributions to the field of chronobiology.

Selected Publications

• Davidson, A. J., Castanon-Cervantes, O., Leise, T. L., Molyneux, P. C., & Harrington, M. E. (2009). Visualizing jet lag in the mouse suprachiasmatic nucleus and peripheral circadian timing system. European Journal of Neuroscience, 29(1), 171–180. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-9568.2008.06534.x
• Harrington, M. E. (1997). The Ventral Lateral Geniculate Nucleus and the Intergeniculate Leaflet: Interrelated Structures in the Visual and Circadian Systems. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 21(5), 705–727. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0149-7634(96)00019-X
• Klerman, E. B., Brager, A., Carskadon, M. A., Depner, C. M., Foster, R., Goel, N., Harrington, M., Holloway, P. M., Knauert, M. P., LeBourgeois, M. K., Lipton, J., Merrow, M., Montagnese, S., Ning, M., Ray, D., Scheer, F. A. J. L., Shea, S. A., Skene, D. J., Spies, C., … Burgess, H. J. (2022). Keeping an eye on circadian time in clinical research and medicine. Clinical and Translational Medicine, 12(12), e1131. https://doi.org/10.1002/ctm2.1131
• Martin-Burgos, B., Wang, W., William, I., Tir, S., Mohammad, I., Javed, R., Smith, S., Cui, Y., Arzavala, J., Mora, D., Smith, C. B., van der Vinne, V., Molyneux, P. C., Miller, S. C., Weaver, D. R., Leise, T. L., & Harrington, M. E. (2022). Methods for Detecting PER2:LUCIFERASE Bioluminescence Rhythms in Freely Moving Mice. Journal of Biological Rhythms, 37(1), 78–93. https://doi.org/10.1177/07487304211062829
• Merrow, M., & Harrington, M. (2020). A functional context for heterogeneity of the circadian clock in cells. PLOS Biology, 18(10), e3000927. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000927
• Nicholls, S. K., Casiraghi, L. P., Wang, W., Weber, E. T., & Harrington, M. E. (2019). Evidence for Internal Desynchrony Caused by Circadian Clock Resetting. The Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 92(2), 259–270. PMID: 31249487
• Raizen, D. M., Mullington, J., Anaclet, C., Clarke, G., Critchley, H., Dantzer, R., Davis, R., Drew, K. L., Fessel, J., Fuller, P. M., Gibson, E. M., Harrington, M., Ian Lipkin, W., Klerman, E. B., Klimas, N., Komaroff, A. L., Koroshetz, W., Krupp, L., Kuppuswamy, A., … Craig Heller, H. (2023). Beyond the symptom: The biology of fatigue. SLEEP, 46(9), zsad069. https://doi.org/10.1093/sleep/zsad069
• Skapetze, L., Owino, S., Lo, E. H., Arai, K., Merrow, M., & Harrington, M. (2023). Rhythms in barriers and fluids: Circadian clock regulation in the aging neurovascular unit. Neurobiology of Disease, 181, 106120. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nbd.2023.106120
• Smith, C. B., Van Der Vinne, V., McCartney, E., Stowie, A. C., Leise, T. L., Martin-Burgos, B., Molyneux, P. C., Garbutt, L. A., Brodsky, M. H., Davidson, A. J., Harrington, M. E., Dallmann, R., & Weaver, D. R. (2022). Cell-Type-Specific Circadian Bioluminescence Rhythms in Dbp Reporter Mice. Journal of Biological Rhythms, 37(1), 53–77. https://doi.org/10.1177/07487304211069452
• Tam, S. K. E., Brown, L. A., Wilson, T. S., Tir, S., Fisk, A. S., Pothecary, C. A., van der Vinne, V., Foster, R. G., Vyazovskiy, V. V., Bannerman, D. M., Harrington, M. E., & Peirson, S. N. (2021). Dim light in the evening causes coordinated realignment of circadian rhythms, sleep, and short-term memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 118(39), e2101591118. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2101591118