She teaches what her Richmond faculty mentor taught her

On a summer night in 2009, neuroscientist J. Leigh Humm Leasure, ’94, marveled at the night sky through one of the telescopes at McDonald Observatory in Fort Davis, Texas. As she did, Leasure felt something akin to looking at brain tissue under a microscope.

“You see this myriad of things, and then you realize: Those are stars, those are cells, and everything that’s out there is in here,” she says.

As director of the Brain Health & Plasticity Lab at the University of Houston, Leasure studies neuroplasticity, the brain’s capacity to change itself in response to behavior. Her primary focus is what exercise does to the brain at the cellular level. In older adults, regular exercise can reverse measurable loss of gray and white matter, Leasure says, a loss that typically accumulates with time. Quelling this loss can mean slowing neurological and physical decline.

“There’s probably no better thing you can do for yourself in terms of brain health than to exercise,” she says.

The path to that conviction began in Richmond in 1990, when Leasure was a biology major with plans to become an environmental lawyer. She took introductory psychology only because it fulfilled a requirement.

One day, she asked her professor a question after class. That professor was Craig Kinsley, a behavioral neuroscientist. He answered her question, then asked one of his own: Did she want to come upstairs and see his lab?

“I was a STEM biology major,” she says. “But I go see his lab, and he’s got these brains, and machines for cutting brains, and microscopes. I was like, ‘Oh, this is cool.’”

Kinsley became Leasure’s mentor. She spent the summer of 1993 working in his lab on campus as a research fellow. He was a morning person, she was not. Kinsley would call her apartment at 10 a.m.: “Leigh, it’s time to come to the lab.” And off she would go.

When Kinsley died in 2016, the loss hurt Leasure deeply. “I have so many good memories of working with Craig,” she says. “It was really sad.”

She says she wouldn’t be studying the brain if not for her time at Richmond and her time with Kinsley. At her lab, she’s still finding things that take her by surprise.

One such finding: Physically active individuals tend to drink more alcohol. Sometimes, that means they drink more after exercise. Other times, it means they exercise more to make up for a night of drinking. The relationship is counterintuitive, but it holds up.

In rodent models, Leasure found that exercise appears to undo much of the damage alcohol causes to the brain. She’s careful about how she says it. “Maybe the better message is balance in all things,” she says. “Neurally speaking, at least in rodents, exercise seems to be a good restorative measure.”

At Houston, she thinks often about the undergraduates she meets. Like herself at 18, they often have no idea where they’re headed.

“I have tried to be Craig Kinsley for psychology students at the University of Houston,” she says. “I can’t say enough about how my time at Richmond changed my life. To the extent that I can, I want to pay that forward and honor Craig’s memory.”