I was introduced and became involved in scientific research during my undergraduate junior year. At the time, I had developed an interest for basic animal research mostly inspired by the prospective of being able to study complex phenomena in an appropriately controlled environment. I began working in Dr. Susan Croll's laboratory as an undergraduate research assistant. My work focused on the neuroanatomical characterization of cells in the limbic cortex from knock-out mice (in this case; mice genetically altered to not express HB-GAM) deficient in the molecule known as heparin binding-growth associated molecule (HB-GAM). The findings from this experiment along with previous work on this model pointed to its potential in modeling pervasive developmental disorders (PDDs) both behaviorally and neuronatomically. This work gave rise to my undergraduate honors thesis (Link ).

In an attempt to explore other lines of research, during my senior year I sought and was offered a position as an undergraduate research assistant in Dr. Peter Sturmey's laboratory while continuing my work on HB-GAM. In Dr. Sturmey's lab, we studied the potential effect of behavioral skills training with general-case training on staff chaining of child vocalizations within natural language paradigm which lead to an article published in the journal of behavioral interventions (link).

In 2008 I began working on a research question meant to follow-up and generalize Dr. Kasselman’s work on brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). In 2006, Kassleman et al., reported that BDNF infusion into the brain during sympathetic system challenge resulted in inflammation similar to what is observed in human connective tissue diseases such as lupus and scleroderma (Link). The manuscript from a series of experiments confirming Kasselman’s findings and adding other serendipitous results are reported in my Master’s thesis (Link ).

In the summer of 2010, I was offered a research abroad position as a graduate researcher sponsored by the LSAMP program. The program was housed at the School of Mental Health and Neuroscience in the University of Maastricht. My Work there focused on testing the potential agonistic properties of a small molecule on the Trk B receptor and hence, its ability to mimic BDNF. Unlike my previous work with humans, rats and mice, this question was targeted using human neuroblastoma cells from the SH-SY5Y cell line. The findings from this project were presented at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology for the Urban University Conference Series.

Currently, my doctoral project focuses on generalizing the BDNF inflammatory model using genetically altered mice and expanding it to include peripheral organs (see more).