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Socioneuroscience: How Discrimination and Brain Health Intersect

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McKayla Williams is a senior double majoring in African American Studies & Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. He was awarded a Fall 2019 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on Discrimination and Cognition  under Dr. Whitney Wharton. 




My name is McKayla Williams, and I am a senior studying neuroscience and behavioral biology and African American studies in the college. I am currently working on an independent research project with Dr. Whitney Wharton in the Department of Neurology, studying the effects of discrimination on cognition in a cohort of cognitively normal, middle-aged people at risk of developing Alzheimer’s Disease. Before joining Dr. Wharton’s lab, I volunteered with the Grady Trauma Project (GTP), a group of researchers affiliated with Grady Hospital and Emory that are studying PTSD in at-risk communities, particularly African Americans. My experiences at Grady humanized clinical research and put real people and their stories at the forefront of the work being conducted. Ultimately, being a part of the GTP team spurred my desire to pursue my own research from start to finish. 

During my fall semester, I was approved to start my project through Dr. Wharton’s lab. I started by scouring discrimination measures for reliable and validated measures to ensure that the data I am collecting would be regarded as valuable. Once I found the measures that best addressed my question, I compiled a set of five surveys: Expanded Everyday Discrimination, Coping with Discrimination, Chronic Work Discrimination and Harassment, Major Experiences of Discrimination and Heightened Vigilance Scales. These questionnaires are designed to measure occurrence and frequency of discrimination and perceived reason for reported discrimination. As I prepared to send out my surveys to the cohort of about 200 participants, I continued to fulfill my duties as a research assistant which includes scoring cognitive tests (which measure someone’s ability to reason, problem solve and manipulate information to answer a question), processing participant blood and cerebral spinal fluid, and data entry. Though we, as a lab, conduct study visits with all participants that include cognitive testing and blood and spinal fluid collection, I did not have to conduct additional study visits to continue my research. As I began to go through the survey responses, I was surprised at the range of shared experiences of discrimination. Additionally, I learned that clinical research is just as much about recruitment and working to retain participants as it is the data you collect because, without participant responses and visits, there would be no data. 


As spring semester approaches, I am continuing to collect discrimination questionnaire responses and will begin cleaning the data and preparing it to be analyzed in relation to the cognitive test scores to determine if there is any correlation. With the help of my principal investigator Dr. Wharton, I am beginning the process of writing a manuscript to be published and assembling my poster to be presented at the Undergraduate Research Symposium in April. I am most looking forward to getting the results from statistical analysis and cannot wait to present what I’ve found. 

Visit the Undergraduate Research Programs website to learn more about applying for Independent Research Grants.
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