Maggie Kyle is a [year] majoring in Psychology. She was awarded a Fall 2018 Conference Grant which she used to attend the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting.
Since the beginning of my sophomore year, I have spent much of my free time researching rhesus monkeys at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center. Like many Emory undergraduates, I came to college planning on studying medicine. I wanted to study Neuroscience and follow the pre-medical track. But when I took an introductory NBB course my freshman year, Foundations of Behavior, I was surprised to find myself just as fascinated to learn about primate behavior and the origins of human evolution as I was to learn about the workings of the brain. I realized how fortunate I was to be at Emory, with one of the seven national primate research centerson our campus, and I began reading about Yerkes scientists as I resolved to get involved with the plethora of research going on there. Soon after, I came upon Dr. Mar Sanchez’s work. Dr. Sanchez researches, among other things, the impact of early exposure to high fat diets and social stress on infant monkey brain development, as a model for early human development. She has also done a large body of work on maternal care behaviors in rhesus monkeys, and the capacity for positive maternal care to buffer high stress situations for infants. I was fascinated as I read some of her papers, and I contacted her immediately. After meeting to discuss my interests, Mar allowed me to join her “Stress, Obesity, and Development” project—research that has since become a passion for me.
Within a semester of starting on the SOD project, I realized that research, not medicine, was what I wanted to devote my education and career to. While both, of course, are necessary to support human health, I loved being on the cutting edge of new discoveries and having the ability to ask and investigate my own questions about what impacts our brains and behavior and how the two are interconnected. My first semester was mostly devoted to editing our subject’s brain scans to ensure that the areas of the brain are accurately covered by digital “masks,” which allows us to use in-house software to extract the volumes from the regions that we are interested in, including the amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex (the center for “top-down” emotional control and decision-making), the amygdala (the hub for our fear response), and the hippocampus (which is heavily associated with memory) form an interconnected set of structures that are involved in emotional responses and regulation. Our research aims to see how high fat diets and social stress early in life impact the development of these structures, because poor diets and high stress environments, such as the extremely stressful environment of living in poverty, are so often comorbid in humans. Rhesus monkeys naturally organize themselves into a social hierarchy, and rank is inherited, which means that socially subordinate monkeys are exposed to much higher rates of aggression and harassment, making their experience a model for chronic stress in humans. We follow our subjects and their mothers from birth through 16 months of age, and we track not only their brain development but also their behavior, feeding habits, and levels of stress hormones such as cortisol. Our findings have been fascinating: we see that subjects given access to a high fat diet early in life show larger overall brain volumes and smaller hippocampal volumes at just 6 months of age. At this time point, we also see larger amygdala volumes in subjects who are socially subordinated. High fat diets and chronic stress, we have found, are clearly altering the course of brain developmentvery early on.
Within a year of joining Mar’s lab, she allowed me to submit an abstract on our preliminary findings to the 2017 Society for Neuroscienceconference, which, with around 30,000 annual attendees, is one of the largest neuroscience conferences in the world. I presented at the conference in Washington, DC last fall. Presenting there and meeting people who were as interested in the field as I am had me hooked on continuing with neuroscience research in the future. A few months later, I applied for an Emory SURE Fellowship, which allowed me to work full-time at Yerkes over the summer of 2018 while being trained in ethical research conduct alongside other undergraduate researchers. I continued to investigate our findings and submitted another abstract to SfN for their 2018 conference in San Diego, which I attended this past month after I was awarded an Emory Conference Grant.
As a senior, the conference was even more interesting for me this year as I think about what I’m going to do in the future. I got to attend talks by people who I will be applying to get my PhD under and network with people working in similar fields from around the world who came to my poster. I plan on taking a gap year before I apply to PhD programs, during which I hope to work in similar research on environmental factors that impact brain development, because I have become so devoted to the SOD project. Now, I am at work on my honors thesis, which we are planning on publishing. Looking back at my college experience, I am so grateful for the research opportunities that Emory has afforded me—in my case, in the form of a renowned primate research center and scientists, summer funding, and conference grants, I have found that Emory is extremely supportive of its student researchers. Being involved in research for the bulk of my undergraduate career has been invaluable: it has given me a mentor, connections, memorable trips to conferences around the country, and, most importantly, a passion.
Visit the Undergraduate Research Programs website to learn more about applying for Conference Grants.
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