Researchers of Emory

Members of the Wilkinson Lab, wearing red clown noses in support of Red Nose Day, which is a campaign dedicated to raising money for children and young people living in poverty. Maggie Mang is a Senior in the College double majoring in Biology and Philosophy. She joined the K.D Wilkinson lab in Fall 2014. Maggie is a SIRE Research Partner, SURE alum 2015, SIRE Peer Mentor and SIRE Independent Research Grant Recipient Fall 2015. For the Fall 2015 semester, most of my research centers on better understanding huntingtin cytotoxicity in Baker’s yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Huntington’s Disease (HD), which affects about 30,000 people in the United States and has the potential to affect 200,000 more 1 , is an incurable, autosomal dominant neurodegenerative disease. HD is categorized by its  severe  motor, physiological, and cognitive deterioration in patients, and is caused by an expansion of glutamines (poly-Q) within the essential gene, huntingtin (Htt)—the mutation i...

Anisha Kaldindi   I am in the research group of Dr. Gretchen Neigh in the Department of Physiology in the School of Medicine. I have been working on a project that involves looking at how chronic adolescent stress affects factors of the stress axis in adulthood. We have developed a protocol in which our animals experience chronic stress during the adolescent period and then we collect the brain tissue in adulthood. Since we are interested in specific regions in the brain we use a machine called a cryostat that allows us to make very thin slices of the brain. There is a lot of literature on the anatomy of the brain in  rats  (our model system), so we are able to use a book called the Rat Brain Atlas, to look at the structural elements of the brain and determine where we can collect the tissue from the region we are interested in.

I still can’t believe how fast the whole summer went by. Between the traveling, research, learning, meeting new people and taking  time  to realize “wow I’m living in Madrid all by myself” I easily had the best summer of my life. Not only did my Spanish language skills improve, my research skills also greatly improved. In terms of  research  I learned how to conduct several behavioral tests (Rotarod, T-maze, T-maze elevated and Object Recognition), perform stereotaxic lesions, perform cell lines, calculate concentrations and sacrifice animals, all while being taught in Spanish. This was my first research experience handling live animals (mice and rats) so that was a very interesting learning experience for me. I didn’t have much fear in terms of handling the actual animals (rats are surprisingly friendly); however, the hardest personal research obstacle occurred when it came time to sacrifice the mice I had been running behavioral tests on for several weeks. Our...

Over fall break, I attended the  meeting of the Cognitive Development Society (CDS)  in Columbus, Ohio. This was my first time attending a development conference. I was particularly excited about the spatial-thinking preconference, facilitated by prominent researchers in the field of spatial cognition including  David Uttal ,  Susan Levine , and  Nora Newcombe . I was fortunate to have the opportunity to discuss my work with these professors. The work I was presenting at CDS was a continuation of work which was originally funded by an independent SIRE grant this past spring. The research is inspired by a simple question: what geometric features guide reorientation in children? Responding to claims that children will use only certain pieces of information (e.g., distance, direction; Lee et al., 2012) to reorient, we wanted to show that children are able to use more than a limited number of discrete cues for purposes of navigation and reorientation. Specifi...

From May 20 to July 27,  2015  I was in  Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda (QENP)  studying its wildlife and ecology. Through those ten weeks I gained knowledge, experience, and memories I will carry with me through my academic and professional careers. The journey started in September 2014 when my Emory advisor,  Dr. Thomas Gillespie , introduced me to one of his top collaborators and friends  Dr. Innocent Rwego  at  One Health Central and Eastern Africa (OHCEA) . He suggested the possibility of a collaborative research experience. I was particularly interested in this opportunity because I have always wanted to do research in a Sub-Saharan country and I also believe One Health studies are new and invaluable to the scientific community. So soon thereafter, I applied for Emory’s International Research Experience for Science Students (IRES) fellowship and was awarded the research grant a few months later.