Ashley Lenhart in her Beckman lab. Photo provided by Lenhart.

Watch the video to learn more about Ashley's work.Learning visually is tricky when your research subjects are too small to see.

Ashley Lenhart, a postdoctoral researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, studies molecules. Specifically, the ones involved in inflammation, which scientists scrutinize to prevent and treat conditions like cancer and heart disease.

Though her work is invisible to the naked eye, Lenhart’s career is patterned in pictures. Sketches scrawled on sticky notes, scribbles on chalkboards and diagrams drawn on broken-down boxes unfold like comic strip tiles, propelling Lenhart from mentee to mentor and from student to scientist.

Neurons on a notecard

Left: Drawing by Ashley Lenhart's mentor Emily Tillmaand depicts the process of serial dilution. Right: Lenhart's own drawing on a yellow sticky note illustrates neuron communication. Images provided by the artists.

To woo Lenhart, neuroscience wisely used a sticky note.

Lenhart was a second-year student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign studying chemistry with professor and Beckman researcher Jonathan Sweedler. Discarding her high school ambition to study forensic science, she became enamored of chemistry and its livelier scene partner, biology.

“I fell in love with research [before I knew] what graduate school was,” she said.

Fortuitously, Lenhart’s mentor, herself a neuroscience graduate student, had the means and medium to deliver a bracing pep talk.

“[My mentor] took out a sticky note and sketched pictures of neurons connecting to one another,” Lenhart said. “She explained everything in depth. That little pad got me so excited to learn about neuroscience, and one day teach others.”

Horrible little pictures

The cover of ACS Measurement Science featuring Lenhart's art. 

After earning her B.S. in chemistry, Lenhart pursued her Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from the University of Michigan. Her penchant for the pictorial remained undiminished amid graduate coursework’s chaos.

“I like to draw or write my thoughts out on paper,” she said. “It’s easier for me to see my ideas flowing together than circling in my head.”

Printer paper, whiteboards and severed walls of spare cardboard boxes became Lenhart’s canvases, bearing brainstorms and research proposals alike. To scaffold a manuscript, she and a lab mate “booked a conference room and spent the day drawing and writing all over two floor-to-ceiling chalkboard walls,” she said.

Lenhart’s art found its audience toward the end of her Ph.D. The journal ACS Measurement Science published her coauthored study and requested a matching cover image illustrating the researchers’ new method for recovering small molecules from tissue samples. Lenhart dictated, her husband Bob Loeffler designed and together they rendered her research in vector, shape and color.

“It was like a visual version of telephone,” she said. “I was drawing these horrible little pictures, trying to get the idea across, and we went back and forth about how best to make it scientifically accurate and aesthetically pleasing.”

By the end of her Ph.D., Lenhart’s cache of canvases included a high-profile academic journal.

Give nanoscale science a hand

Ashley Lenhart using a mass spectrometer at the Beckman Institute to analyze a sample tissue's chemical composition. Photo provided by Lenhart.

Doctorate in hand, Lenhart returned to Illinois for her postdoctoral appointment at the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Chicago, where University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University and University of Chicago researchers build tools to study inflammation’s molecular mechanisms and combat inflammatory conditions like cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s disease.

Most Biohub employees work in the city office, but Lenhart is posted in Urbana for ease of access to its facilities. Working once again with the Sweedler Group, she develops methods to collect and analyze molecules from brain and muscle tissue.

“If you flex your hand,” she said, “you can see it move. Some imaging techniques help you see the bone and muscle working together under your skin. My job is to get even closer, to see the electrical signals firing, generating the chemicals that move your muscles.”

Beckman houses a collection of research facilities Lenhart uses for her Biohub-funded work. She favors three: a cryostat, which slices tissue samples and stores them in sub-zero temperatures; a mass spectrometer, which zigzags a laser beam across a tissue sample to craft a chemical map; and a fluorescence microscope, which offers a nuanced look at cells’ nuclei and other organelles.

“If we don’t know what molecules in the tissue are doing, we will never know what causes inflammatory diseases or how drugs might affect them, or how to cure them. That’s why we need to get down to the molecular level,” she said.

Sugar, salt, sketches

Lenhart pipettes a salt and sugar solution into water to dilute the contents to appropriate concentrations for probe perfusion. Photo provided by Lenhart.

Getting down to the molecular level entails a 7-hour relay of small-scale experiments.

First, Lenhart concocts a sugar-salt-water solution and plops in a tissue sample (“like a slice of brain,” she said). Then, she manipulates a fingertip-sized probe among the sample’s folds. The tissue’s cells excrete chemicals into the solution, and the probe sucks up those chemicals like an underwater, diffusion-based vacuum. From this sample, the researchers analyze a nanoliter-sized drop of liquid — as well as the original tissue slice — in the mass spectrometer to determine which chemicals are present and where they are.

“Think of a liter of water and then compare it to the Moon,” Lenhart said. “Roughly, that illustrates how one of our sample droplets compares to a liter. Ideally, we want to get even smaller.”

As Lenhart’s research gets closer to perching comfortably on a picolitre-sized pinhead, her visualization techniques only grow.

“I’m learning how to convey so much information with very few words, like in presentations or figures. It is still something I think hard about every time I share my work with an external audience,” she said.

Among her audiences are Lenhart’s current mentees: undergraduates in her lab and one high school student in the Illinois Science and Technology Coalition’s Mentor Matching Engine.

“Where I am now is thanks to mentors believing in me and pushing me. Giving back and playing that role for others is incredible,” Lenhart said. “The neatest moments are when students ask for my input on achieving their goals because I remember having those moments and conversations myself as a mentee and how impactful they were.”