Q&A: IU Indy’s leader for new Institute for Human Health and Wellbeing got start studying mice and binge drinking

Steve Boehm

Stephen Boehm was a music major in college, but on a fluke, a psychology professor asked him to help with some research in his lab on fetal alcohol syndrome. That began Boehm’s new career path as a science researcher, along with switching his undergraduate major to psychology.

Boehm has spent decades studying addictions and binge drinking, and was longtime professor and chair of the Indiana University Indy psychology department.

Now, he is beginning a new challenge. Last month, IU named him inaugural executive director of the new Institute for Human Health and Wellbeing, with the goal of advancing scientific discoveries aimed at curing and treating diseases and improving human health. It’s part of IU’s $250 million investment into biosciences and life sciences announced last fall. (In June, the university named Chia-Ying “James” Lin as the first executive director of Convergent Bioscience and Technology Institute.)

Boehm, who earned a doctorate in behavioral neuroscience from Oregon Health & Science University, spoke with IBJ about his new assignment, his career path and his research. This Q&A has been slightly edited for clarity and space.

IBJ: Can you explain what the institute’s role will be?

Boehm: In some ways that’s a really good question, because I think for Indiana University, the idea for these institutes is to really bring collaborative research on campus, together with the community and industry and even government locally in Indiana to hopefully really drive some positive change in the health and wellness of Hoosiers.

IBJ: How will you do that?

Boehm: I think it has to start with just lots of conversations. I have some ideas of folks I want to talk to first to try to get off on the right foot and make key connections to the community, to industry and government, to start moving us in a direction that that involves everybody, and possibly could impact positively health and wellbeing in the state.

IBJ: So who might some of those people be?

Boehm: There are some folks here on campus, there are several existing institute directors or center directors that I would like to talk to. There’s also the search committee for this position. It’s funny how this came about. I actually was asked to serve on the search committee for this, this particular role, and served on that search committee for three or four months, possibly longer, before I was asked if I would consider applying myself.

So I would like to talk to my colleagues on that search committee, because they were all asked, just like I was, to serve on that committee, because they all perform certain functions and roles here on campus in our positions collectively, I think to really help inform what this might look like, and help me make some good decisions about key individuals off campus that maybe could help also make those introductions, so that those relationships can start to form and grow.

IBJ: Central Indiana already has a wealth of medical and hospital research institutes doing amazing work. How do you avoid duplicating what they’re doing?

Boehm: So it starts with these conversations.. The idea is not just to connect with the community and leverage the expertise of those individuals, but also to build synergism and collaboration between institutes, and perhaps bring all those institutes and centers into the fold, so that we can do bigger things, and so that we can dream bigger about the way we might impact the community. There should not be duplication. The idea is to bring folks together and figure out how and what we can do collectively that we hadn’t really been able to visualize or put together before.

IBJ: Can you talk about any specific goals you hope to achieve after having these conversations?

Boehm: What I am hoping to build broadly in this institute is something that focuses on health disparities and health inequities in the state. And so the idea—and mind you, that there are entities on this campus that are focused on various aspects of this already—but bring all these folks together and focus on various aspects of health and wellbeing in the state that would seemingly fall under that. So addiction and mental health are two really broad areas, but there are lots of ideas that in that include aspects of the environment and the environments that Hoosiers live in.

IBJ: IU has committed $250 million for these two new institutes. How will the money be spent? Are you hiring more researchers?

Boehm:  Absolutely, yeah. So I can’t be specific on how many folks, how many researchers we will hire, partly because I’m personally not sure how many. But I mean, practically speaking, depending on the discipline, it can cost more or less money to bring somebody here and set them up with a lab. Clinical psychologists might not take as much, what we call startup funds, to get a lab up and running for somebody, as it might take a neuroscientist. So we’re talking on the, you know, maybe $300,000 for a clinical psychologist, depending on who they are, versus possibly one and a half million dollars for a neuroscientist.

IBJ: I’m curious about your own research. How did you get interested in addictions as a young psychologist?

Boehm: Just like with most of my colleagues, it kind of happens by accident. For me, it goes all the way back to my undergraduate training when I was in college myself. I was a music major, and actually had almost a full ride to study saxophone performance.

IBJ: No kidding.

Boehm: Yeah, I didn’t like it. And I think, ultimately, it was maturity. So one example: if you’re in a college setting, you can’t just pick up your horn and practice anytime you want. You have to sign up for a practice room, and you have to practice whenever you’ve got that room. And you know, you’re dictated to by who else is already signed up and when.

I didn’t like that, and it really wasn’t working for me. I was oftentimes skipping practicing entirely because I just wasn’t mature enough to deal with that sort of situation. Sometimes I wonder what how things might have played out if I would have stuck with it.

But when I kind of turned away from music, it didn’t take long, within, like six months, if I’m remembering correctly,  I was simply asked by a professor in a physiological psychology course if I was interested in doing some research, that he was looking for someone to help out in his lab. And it turns out that this individual was an alcohol researcher studying fetal alcohol syndrome, and more specifically, the genetic determinants of fetal alcohol syndrome, or sensitivity to prenatal alcohol effects, and using mice as a model system to study that. And so that kind of expands the answer a little bit. That’s how I got it.

So I got my start there. I continued with alcohol, and, you know, modeling various aspects of alcohol sensitivity and effects on the brain in mice. And I’ve just continued that the whole time, and that has developed over the last 15 to 20 years into a real interest in binge drinking, and more recently, on brain circuits that might underlie binge drinking.

IBJ: So do you have mice that have developed binge drinking behavior?

Boehm: Yeah, I have mice that binge drink. It’s pretty cool, actually, to watch them learn about the alcohol. And I’m also interested in how these brain circuits change, and because these mice will binge drink every day, if I allow them. And I’m interested in how those brain circuits rewire and change over repeated bouts of binge drinking.

IBJ: What would you say has been your best research outcome or your best finding on binge drinking?

Boehm: That’s always a hard question for me to answer, because there have been lots of different things that were super exciting to me. But the Holy Grail finding that I’ve been hoping for has eluded me, in terms of what I would deem super important change neurobiologically, as a consequence of repeated binge drinking. But we continue to search right and to study specific circuits to identify what we think is a really cool change.

What I think are cool things have been related to the behavioral changes that these mice undergo is their binge drinking and so we assume that these behavioral changes are underlied by key changes in various brain circuits. And probably they aren’t all the same circuits. They’re different ones that’s kind of subserve different aspects of this. But when the mice in my hands engage in binge drinking, the first thing I tell you is it, I don’t have to promote it. I just give them a 20% unsweetened alcohol solution, and they and they will go after I give it to them for two hours a day and three hours into the dark cycle.

And I do this in an attempt to model what the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism defines as binge drinking, and they kind of focus in on this: two hours of heavy alcohol drinking that leads to a blood alcohol above at least 0.08 milligrams per deciliter. And that’s just turns out to also be the legal driving limit as well, but that also tends to be a blood level for that in which most people who reach that are feeling the effects of the alcohol. You might call it a pretty strong buzz, if you will.

IBJ: Have you been able to translate this research into human behavior?

Boehm: Oh, absolutely. And so, in fact, we’re on all these points. We’re trying to deliberately model aspects of human behavior. And so what’s really cool about the mouse is, while they’re small and they breed, and they become adults in 60 days or so after they’re born. That’s all great, but they display developmentally and as adults, really, all the behaviors that you would expect to see in humans.

They have a period of adolescence, and they engage in adolescent-like behavior. They respond to alcohol in the way that humans do. In my hands, I even see more aggressive, if you will, binge drinking during adolescence in these mice than they do when they mature to adults, which I think is fascinating.

But all the behavioral responses that you expect to see are there, and the brain changes that underlie all those seem to be similar to,o so the hope is that if you determine some key behavioral or brain change in the mouse, you can immediately really, focusing on the brain part, you know exactly where in the human brain to look for the same change.

And you know, you can extrapolate back and forth from mouse to human and back to mouse again from humans.