Researchers of Emory

Natalia Brody is a junior majoring in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. She was awarded a Fall 2017 Independent Grant which she used to conduct research on the relationship between estrogen and fear generalization under Dr. Brian Dias.   The first (and most important) thing a young scientist is taught is “the hypothesis.” In middle school, we are taught that a hypothesis is a potential explanation for a scientific phenomenon. Once a little older, if you’re lucky, the abstract idea of a hypothesis comes to life as you write your own research proposals, posters, and even lectures on these “potential explanations.” But, in perhaps the most important lesson of all, you’ll eventually learn that these hypotheses change— their potential nature comes crashing down just as easily as they were created to begin with. This is an in valuable lesson my participation in the research grant program allowed me.

Mia Morrell  is a sophomore majoring in Physics. She was awarded a Spring 2018 Conference Grant which she used to attend the American Physical Society Meeting in Los Angeles. When shaking parmesan cheese on your pizza, have you mused in frustration why the cheese always seems to clog up in the holes of its container? Have you ever clogged a toilet and wondered what led to this most unfortunate form of humiliation? Or on a more serious note, have you contemplated the arterial clotting of human blood cells in the early phases of a stroke? Our plexiglass hopper chamber displaying hydrogel particles in a clogged state. These questions have fascinated me ever since I was introduced to soft matter physics upon my freshman year at Emory. During my time in Emory University’s  Weeks lab , which focuses on soft matter and complex systems , I have studied soft particle clogging in two dimensions , devising experiments which can be applied to the previously cited situations o...

Tristan Yates is a senior majoring in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. She was awarded a Fall 2017 Independent Grant which she used to conduct research on child development and memory under Dr. Patricia Bauer. In my honors thesis work, I am investigating whether the structure of newly-learned information impacts preschoolers’ abilities to extend that information to produce novel understandings of related concepts.   A large part of this journey has been discovering what it is that preschoolers actually know and care about , and as an aside, it is not always listening to a college-aged researcher, regardless of how many stickers she offers during a session. Prior to entering the Bauer Memory Development Lab, I had little experience within the world of child development. Thus, while developing and validating new stimuli for the lab’s memory integration paradigm, I overestimated the types of information four-year-olds could hold in their little brains. This summer, my gradu...

Stephanie Wahab  is a recent graduate who majored in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. She was awarded a Spring 2016 Independent Grant which she used to conduct research on scene processing under Dr. Daniel Dilks. Humans recognize a “scene” or place in a fraction of a second and almost simultaneously navigate that scene flawlessly and effortlessly. This remarkable ability is thought to rely on three distinct brain regions that are selectively involved in recognizing scenes and objects. These regions include the occipital place area (OPA) (Dilks et al., 2013), the retrosplenial complex (RSC) (Maguire, 2001), and the parahippocampal place area (PPA) (Epstein and Kanwisher, 1998). While each of these regions show clear scene selectivity, responding more strongly to images of scenes than images of objects or faces, the precise role each region plays in scene processing is still unclear, and the subject of ongoing debate. The Dilks Lab looks into scientific inquiries related ...

Daniel Jacobs is a junior majoring in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. He was awarded a Fall 2017 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on attention under Dr. Daniel Dilks.   After spending hours sitting with my PI and graduate mentors, mulling over the concepts for our new project, I expected the execution of the experiment to go relatively smoothly. We hashed out all of our ideas and concerns regarding the methods. All that was left was to implement our plans and analyze the results, right? Unfortunately, things did not go as smoothly as we had hoped. No amount of time creating stimuli or losing sleep over an unenthusiastic participant could have prepared me for the unexpected hiccups of a research endeavor.