I get a lot of questions about my background and what I do now. Perhaps more of those than about neuroscience. I figured I might as well address that, and it might give me a bit more cred in the field to list my qualifications and past research. I was pre-med in my undergrad, and even got so far as being accepted at medical schools before I decided I would definitely rather do research/teaching and went to get a PhD instead.
I majored in neuroscience at my undergrad and did my honors thesis on developing new techniques of fMRI. I attempted to use crayfish, a simple invertebrate model without a blood brain barrier, to see if a different chemical could be used to directly image brain activity. The way we do fMRI now is by relying on the change from oxygenated to deoxygenated hemoglobin. Crayfish don’t have hemoglobin, they are small, and they have very simple neural systems. We used manganese (which can mimic calcium and enter recently active neurons) to see if we could get a more direct analog of activity in the brain (instead of relying on blood flow changes). To develop this, I also did extracellular recordings of the optic nerve to see if I could figure out which light signal would produce the most responses from the crayfish optic nerve.
My other research projects have delved into wet lab techniques, such that I did calcium imaging in cultured neurons (grown in a dish) as well as looking at how different receptors and proteins might be affecting an analog of MS (multiple sclerosis) in mice (called EAE). I also did work with hypoglycemia and how that affects different cognitive tasks in humans (using fMRI again).
More recently, in my work as a graduate student at Yale University, I have been looking at cognitive control tasks in humans using various imaging techniques (mostly fMRI and PET). Cognitive control tasks can measure many different things, including how you respond to errors, how you stop yourself from doing something, self-control, and impulsivity. We look at these in “healthy controls” as well as in different patient populations- for example, cocaine addicts, people with OCD, Tourette’s, etc.
Almost 2,000 of you follow my blog now- and I am really excited to see how many people are interested in neuroscience! It’s a great field, and I enjoy getting to share my knowledge with you. Hopefully this will now lend more cred to my posts and also answer the numerous questions I have been getting!
