My path in choosing my major was a bit more linear than one would expect. I had been wanting to study neuroscience before even coming to UW, and remained dead set on that decision for the ensuing four years. To me, neuroscience was one of the best ways to study life. I was fascinated by the idea that we were able to make sense of our world (literally through our senses) and develop an individual experience of life because of a mass of tissue housed in our skulls. If stripped down to the basics, we are essentially a bundle of neurons communicating through bursts of electrical impulses. How can we experience life out of that? While my time studying neuroscience has answered a lot of my burning questions, it has also shown me that there is so much still to be discovered about the essence of complex life. Here, I share a few of the courses and research experiences that represent my time studying neuroscience at UW, and that have informed my continued fascination with the field.
HONORS 221 (Pain): A Course that Set My Academic Path
During Winter quarter 2017, I enrolled in an Honors seminar titled Pain, taught by Dr. Loeser and Dr. Mayer, which ended up fully solidifying my desire to pursue neuroscience as a field of study. I was excited to learn more about an elusive, misunderstood, but universal experience that has long been ineffectively treated or ignored in traditional medicine. And I was not disappointed. We learned about pain from a variety of disciplines—medicine, biology, psychology and economics. This class completely changed my perspective on the experience of pain, and increased my awareness of health care systems' approaches to treating chronic pain and the significant problems that come with limited understanding of the etiology of chronic pain or of effective pain management techniques. And thus started a love affair with chronic pain research that ended up being a critical part of my UW experience. A year after taking the course, I applied for the UW Scan Design Innovations in Pain Research Summer Program, and started my pain research journey at Seattle Children's Research Institute.
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Seattle Children's Research Institute: Pediatric Chronic Pain
Starting in the summer after my sophomore year (2018), I, along with two other UW students, started an internship at Seattle Children's working in the Pediatric Pain and Sleep Innovations Lab, a clinical psychology lab whose focus is on alternative treatments for pediatric chronic pain. Throughout this research internship, I worked with Dr. Tonya Palermo and her team at Seattle Children's Research Institute, learning more about chronic pain disorders and their prevalence, particularly in pediatric populations. I was able to participate in clinical and epidemiological research, which broadened my understanding of the implications of unexplained, persistent pain for millions of Americans and countless others worldwide, and the potential role of non-pharmacological interventions. I have continued to work with Dr. Palermo and her wonderful team at SCRI, and have not only learned so much about the scientific research process and been able to contribute to meaningful projects, but have made connections with incredible researchers, made lifelong friends, and learned more about what I am interested in continuing to pursue after graduation.
After that first summer at SCRI, I had learned so much, but was left with unanswered questions about the nervous system, and how it can provide us with such an incredible experience of life but fail us in the most debilitating ways. So I started to prepare for applying for the Neuroscience major. |
UW Neuroscience Program
My coursework in the neuroscience major has broadened my mind in a way that I would have never expected. To learn about the nervous system, from the minute molecular mechanisms to behavioral manifestations of physiological processes, has been a privilege. I have learned how immensely intricate the existence of life is, how to write a 24-page lab report in one long, sleepless night (which I and all of my peers do NOT recommend), and just how much we still don't know about the brain. I have countless notebooks filled with colorful diagrams of cranial nerves, spinal sensory and motor pathways, common psychiatric disorder mechanisms, the superpowers of weakly electric fish, and crayfish dissections (an animal with whom I have had only negative experiences (see more in the next section)). I have a handful of lab reports and presentations that I look back on now and wonder, "how did we learn all of this stuff?" and "why would they ever trust us to do experiments on flying cockroaches that could escape and cause a mass invasion of the health sciences building?" Through this major, I have been pushed to think like a scientist, psychologist, researcher, and teacher, and have learned so much more than I could have ever imagined. I have become more and more cognizant of the ethical and social implications that are critical to consider in this field (if we don't want to end up in a real-life Matrix), and the importance of being a well-rounded and socially aware member of the scientific research community. I have developed a fascination with the brain that I know will be life-long, and I am so excited to continuing learning everything neuroscience has to offer, and watch as the field continues to provide us with insightful and life-changing discoveries.
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Neuroscience Thesis
I am excited to be completing my Neuroscience degree with a thesis, a culmination of my education within the neuroscience program and my work at Seattle Children's. As I have learned extensively through my lab research, there is a strong relationship between sleep and the experience of pain, often cited as bidirectional. Thus, I am studying the sleep architecture of pediatric chronic pain patients, with the hope that a better understanding of how sleep in children with chronic pain differs from a healthy standard can provide meaningful insight on targeting sleep as an approach to treating chronic pain. With the support of my mentors, Dr. Tonya Palermo and Dr. Caitlin Murray, I continue to learn more and more about what it takes to pursue clinical research and how to contribute to a scientific field in a way that could potentially transform medicine.