Researchers of Emory

Nicklas Gose is a SURE participant double majoring in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology & English. SURE Research Ambassador Adi Pucha had the pleasure of interviewing Nicklas about his research experiences. What are you up to this summer? I am currently conducting research in Psychology on rearing behavior in rats during an emotional memory task. How long have you been involved in research, and how did you first get involved? I started doing research in August of 2021 with Dr. Thompson at Oxford. I was interested in joining his neuroendocrinology lab, so I approached him at the end of one of his classes and asked if I could get involved. What motivated you to select your current research topic? I work in a lab that uses electrophysiology to understand how emotional memories in rats are encoded, but I wanted to focus specifically on the ethological relevance of the emotional memory task. Another motivation was that it seemed feasible to complete within the time constraints of the ...

Audrika Chattaraj (she/her) is a Human Health major and French minor on the Pre-med track. SURE Research Ambassador Sanjana Kunnikuru had the pleasure of interviewing Chattaraj about her research experiences. What are you up to this summer? I'm doing biomedical research this summer. My project aims to understand the role of the gut microbiome on sleep in Idiopathic Hypersomnia (IH) using a fruit fly model and to view the changes in symptoms of IH patients over time. Idiopathic Hypersomnia is a sleep disorder characterized by excessive daytime sleepiness despite long sleep duration, but there are no known diagnostic criteria, and symptoms are not well understood. To better understand the role of the guy microbiome in IH, I am exposing germ-free flies to gut microbiome samples of patients with IH before and after they are given an antibiotic treatment and recorded sleep patterns using a Drosophila Activity Monitor to be analyzed for 33 sleep characteristics. Furthermore, to examine c...

Sneha Malepati is majoring in neuroscience, behavioral biology, and physics. This summer, she is researching neurodegenerative diseases. Specifically, Malepati uses metabolic labeling to track protein changes in various brain cell types in stroke and Alzheimer’s disease models. Malepati began research in the fall of her junior year. After exploring many neuroscience topics in her classes, Malepati wanted to better understand how neurological diseases affect us on a cellular level. This interest played a huge role in the lab she joined and the selection of her current research project. To get involved, she first identified a research field that interested her and sought out researchers that were studying this field.  Reading scientific papers played a massive role in allowing her to find PIs (Principal Investigators) conducting research in areas of interest to her. PI and postdoc mentors have played a significant role in Malepati’s growth as a researcher, and she has found researchi...