Your Name

• In addition to completing my dissertation research, I successfully established a protocol for intracranial hemorrhage induction using autologous blood delivery for a collaborator, Dr. Ewa Bienkiewicz. This work contributed to a successful application for a one-year NIH SBIR (Phase 1) grant, entitled "A Novel Therapeutic Peptide for Treating Stroke".​As a part of a directed individual study, I worked with Dr. Jose Pinto to investigate the mechanisms of the comorbidity between hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and mood disorder in a mouse model. This work resulted in a manuscript that has been submitted to the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal. As a trainee on the Integrative Clinical-Neuroscience Training grant, I successfully conducted study visits with patients with eating disorders and delineated the impact of eating disorders on baseline and postprandial levels of feeding-related peptides. This work resulted in a publication in the International Journal of Eating Disorders. ​
  

• Lead behavioral and biochemical projects that identified estrous cycle-mediated sensitivity to ketamine, as well as delineated molecular mechanisms for this sensitivity within the hippocampus. This work resulted in a manuscript that is in preparation for submission to Neuroscience.

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• Lead behavioral and biochemical investigation into the role of the immediate-early gene, Zif268, within the prefrontal cortex, to protect learning and memory functions in a model of testosterone depletion. This work has lead to a first author manuscript that has been submitted to Neuroscience.

• Thesis: Glucagon-like peptide 1 receptors in nucleus accumbens affect food intake.

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• Conducted behavioral and pharmacological techniques to eludicate the micro- and macrostructural features of food intake, with an emphasis on understanding the influence of specific neural loci that regulated palatable food intake.

• Lead projects that established functional connectivity between homeostatic food intake and reward-related brain regions. These resulted in first author publications in Journal of Neuroscience and American Journal of Physiology.

• Awarded a training position on the Integrative Clinical-Neuroscience Training Grant. In this position I investigated levels of feeding-related peptides in females with eating disorders and was published in the International Journal of Eating Disorders.

Advisor: Dr. Colleen Garbe Le Prell 

• Conducted sensitive measurements of auditory brain stem responses following hearing loss-inducing stimuli to accurately detect level of hearing loss.

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• Performed cochlear dissection, immunohistochemistry, and confocal imaging to investigate the relationship between noise-induced hearing loss and activation of cell death pathways within the cochlea.

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• Maintained impeccable standards in managing chemical inventories and ordering, safely disposed of waste, effectively assisted undergraduate honors thesis students, and efficiently collected and managed data.

Advisor: Dr. David Smith 

• Successfully employed psychophysical techiniques to uncover the association between olfactory perceptions and the underlying physiological mechanisms of olfactory adaptation and odor masking.

• Maintained impeccable standards in managing chemical inventories and ordering, safely disposed of waste, assisted undergraduate students, reliably prepared chemicals and equipment for daily experimentation, and proficiently collected and organized behavioral data.