The Second Brain: Marissa’s Journey

Marissa Scavuzzo carefully placed the small frog in her pocket, hoping it would stay put during the movie. She remembered this moment vividly years later as she adjusted her microscope in her lab at Case Western Reserve University.

“I used to collect like frogs. I remember one time I had a frog that I like put in my pocket and I tried to take it to the movie theater, and it escaped. It was this whole thing,” she shared with a laugh.

As an Assistant Professor at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Marissa now runs her own research lab where that childhood curiosity has evolved into scientific inquiry. 

Her team is investigating something many don’t know even exists.

“We’re interested in a nervous system that’s inside of your gut. It’s sometimes called a second brain,” she explained. “If you actually take, and we do this a lot, we take the mouse intestine out and we stick it in a dish, it actually moves around on its own for several days. ‘Cause it doesn’t need the brain.”

Growing up, Marissa never imagined herself as a scientist. “Neither of my parents are in any type of science. My dad was a first-generation college student and my mom didn’t go to college. And I think for them, they just thought like being a medical doctor was like the epitome of success.”

College changed everything for Marissa, though not immediately. “I was just about to graduate. I had no idea how to go on and continue in this career,” she recalled. It was only when “somebody asked if I wanted to work in a research lab just to get the experience” that she discovered her true calling.

“When I got into the lab and I realized just how much you get to follow your own ideas and you get to daydream and you get to actually test the ideas you have and you’re finding things out that nobody else has looked at, which is just really, really cool… I just got instantly hooked and I knew this was just what I had to do.”

The path wasn’t always easy. “I wasn’t a super strong student through college,” she admitted. “I think once I got into a research lab that helped me a lot because it gave me some sense of purpose.”

Even graduate school presented challenges: “I was told when I got my PhD that after I graduated that they didn’t want to even let me in the program and that’s, you know, one person advocated for me to get into the program. And then I ended up giving the commencement speech.”

Now, as a mentor herself, Marissa makes sure to create opportunities for students from all backgrounds. “Don’t work in a research lab for free. Your labor is worth money and no labor should be free,” she insisted. “I have high school students and a lot of college students that work in my lab and we pay them hourly to work in the lab. Your labor is important.”

Looking at her team of researchers gathering around a laboratory bench, Marissa reflected on how different her reality was from what she once imagined science to be.

“I always thought like being a scientist, you had to be, you know, I picture in my head Albert Einstein in a dark room by himself, you know, this old white guy with a lab coat and a, chalkboard,” she said. “But it’s just very, very different.”

What she discovered instead was that science thrives on diversity of thought and experience. “We need people that look at questions differently, who have different experiences in their life that come from different backgrounds.”

Marissa smiled as she watched her team work. “Even if you don’t think like, ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that, I’m not good at math.’ Well, that’s why we have calculators. And it’s also, there’s people that are doing science that are really, really doing groundbreaking work and it’s because they see things differently. So if you feel like you’re different and you see things different than other people, then I think that science is absolutely for you.”

As she prepared to attend an upcoming STEM event where thousands of students would collect trading cards featuring scientists like her, Marissa knew her story might inspire a child who, like her younger self, was still discovering their own potential.

“Science is really a team sport,” she said, “and we love that in our lab.”