Researchers of Emory

  Holly Cordray   is a senior majoring in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. She was awarded a Fall 2020 Independent Grant which she used to conduct research at Children's Healthcare Atlanta. My name is Holly Cordray, and I am a senior in the Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology Honors Program.  Collaborating with Dr. Kara Prickett, a pediatric ENT surgeon at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, I am currently running a 150-patient clinical trial of an interactive resource I developed for pediatric patient education: an educational pop-up book for children facing surgery.  I began this project in 2019 with the support of the SURE program and my mentor in the Art History department, Dr. Tasha Dobbin-Bennett.  I wanted to build a resource that would engage children in active learning through hands-on features like flaps, wheels, and pull-tabs, equipping patients with understanding and positive coping strategies as they prepare for surgery.  I am hoping this rea...

                                                     Amy Ma  is a senior majoring in Psychology with a minor in Quantitative Sciences. She was awarded a Fall 2019  Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on Human Behavior under Dr. Jessica Barber. 

Bella Ren is a senior double majoring in Quantitative Sciences and Psychology. She was awarded a Fall 2019 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on Ethics under Dr. Adam Glynn. 

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. 

Icho Lu  is a senior majoring in Biology. She was awarded a Fall 2019 Independent Grant which she used to conduct research on liver lipid homeostasis under Dr. David Pallas.

Ji Won Lee  is a junior majoring in Biology. She was awarded a Fall 2019 Independent Grant which she used to conduct research on autoimmunity under Dr. David Pallas. 

Jahnvi Jain is a senior majoring in  Anthropology and Human Biology.   She was awarded a Fall 2019 Independent Grant which she used to conduct research on  post traumatic  stress disorder under Dr. Negar  Fani . 

                                 Michael Mu  is a Senior majoring in Biology. He was awarded a Fall 2019 Independent Grant which she used to attend the National Conference on Undergraduate Research.

Ruhika Prasad  is a Senior majoring in Anthropology and Human Biology. She was awarded a Summer 2019 Independent Grant which she used to conduct research on mental health needs in Myosore, Karnataka under Dr.   Joyce Flueckiger .   This summer was a whirlwind of amazing experiences. I couldn’t believe I had the opportunity  to conduct my thesis research in Mysore, Karnataka this summer. It was incredible to spend time in India and work with an amazing organization to do it! I worked with the Public Health  Research Institute of India (PHRI- link:  http://www.phrii.com/ ). 

Annie Schiffer is a senior double  majoring  in biology and environmental science. She received a Summer 2019 Independent Grant which she used to to study community ecology under Dr.  Berry Brosi. 

Kasey Cervantes  is a Junior majoring in Biology. He was awarded a Summer 2019 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on Malaria under Dr. Helen Baker.  Figure 1 This summer I undertook research into mosquitoes associated with malarial transmission at the  Natural History Museum  (NHM)   in   London in collaboration  with the  Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) , and the  Emory School of Nursing   (Figure 1) . Mosquitoes (Culicidae) are dipterans – True flies, which is one of the orders of insects, the scientific study of which is called  entomology . 

Martin  Pimentel  is a Senior  double majoring in  History  and Political Science. He was awarded a Summer 2019 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on Post-Civil War rumors under Dr. Jason Ward. 

Liza Cobey  is a Junior double majoring in American studies and Media Studies . She was awarded a  Summer 2019 Independent Grant which she used to conduct research on the history associated with the desegregation of schools in the U.S. under Dr. Vanessa Siddle Walker.  For generations, the women in my family have taught. My grandmother taught at the high school I attended decades before I was born, and my aunts, a cousin, and my mother all call their schools their second home. I grew up in a perpetual extended family tied together by bus routes and classrooms. I had no intention of following their path when I came to Emory. Despite this, by the second semester of my freshman year, I had connected with one of the few remaining professors from Emory’s Department of Education, and by the fall I was enamored with her work.

 Ramsey Baden  is a senior majoring in English and Creative  Writing . He was awarded a Spring 2019 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on the Taiwanese White Terror under Dr. Joonna Trapp.  There are few experiences as isolating as being separated from your home. When I started college, I began realizing just how much I missed my home in Taiwan. I began devoting massive amounts of energy to my new quest: I was to find out what it meant to be Taiwanese-American. It was a scheme that became daunting when I realized I had started just a moment too late, and that I was already physically removed from the island that in many ways feels more like home than anywhere else on this planet.

Ryan  McCann  is a junior who majoring in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. He was awarded a Spring 2019 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on experimental mouse tissue under Dr. David Weinshenker. When reading through literature on PubMed, you rarely see a research paper that has no acknowledgments. Most projects need multiple people putting their time and energy into producing the best results possible. Thus, there are often many names included in the acknowledgements, because the main authors needed assistance. I recently ran into some difficulties with my own project and realized just how important it is to work with other members of the research community. For the past two years, I have been fortunate to be a research assistant in the  Weinshenker Laboratory ( http://genetics.emory.edu/research/weinshenker/ ). Working with Dr. Weinshenker has been an amazing experience. I have been assigned to multiple projects, and exposed to different...

Caroline Scheving is a senior who majoring in Art History. She was awarded a Spring 2019 Independent Grant which she used to conduct research on the culture of the early twentieth century and Frank Benson's  dolls  under Dr. Linda Merrill. Last fall, when I returned to Emory to begin my senior year, I realized that I was in a bit of a conundrum. I had come to the conclusion that I was no longer interested in the illustrations of  Robinson Crusoe , the topic I had originally chosen for my art history honors thesis. I needed to find a new subject as quickly as possible, and this time I knew I needed to choose a topic that interested me on a more personal level. After agonizing over the future of my thesis for several days, I finally recalled a conversation I had during my sophomore year with my advisor Dr. Linda Merrill. She had mentioned Frank Weston Benson’s (1862-1951) collection of paper dolls, called the Colton Family, that the  High Museum of Art had acqu...

Sally Zhang  is a junior who is majoring in Biology. She was awarded a Fall 2018 Independent Grant which she used to conduct research on ubiquination and Alzheimer's disease  under Dr. Hyojung Choo.  I started doing my project at the Seyfried Lab of the Biochemistry department and Center for Neurodegenerative diseases of Emory School of Medicine in April 2018. My project aims to examine the mechanisms underlying the turnover of insoluble neurofibrillary tangles of Tau, a key type of pathological protein aggregate in Alzheimer’s disease. Alzheimer’s disease is characterized by the presence of protein aggregates and a loss of protein homeostasis. Ubiquitin (Ub) is a 76 amino acid peptide that marks proteins for degradation mainly through the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) and autophagy. Modification by Lys-48-linked poly-Ub chains has been reported as means of selecting proteins for degradation by the UPS. Whereas, Lys-63-linked poly-ubiquitination is associ...

Philip Chu  is a senior who majoring in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology. He was awarded a Fall 2018 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on Renal Cell Cancer under Dr. John Petros.  Medicine heals people, but research is what advances medicine. The reason I’ve done  research throughout my undergraduate experience is because I want to constantly contribute to  the advancement of medicine. What motivates me in lab is the thought that every experiment is   potentially a step closer in benefiting innumerable lives. I view medicine as the present, and   research as the future.

Kaveri Sheth  is a senior who is double majoring in Psychology and Linguistics. She was awarded a Fall 2018 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on source memory recall in bilingual students under Dr. Patricia Bauer.  I have been working in the Bauer lab for the past three years. In the lab, I have become accustomed to throwing out words, such as self-derivation (the process of combining two separate but related facts), stem facts (the separate yet related facts), and integration facts (a fact that can be self-derived). These words have become the norm for me, just like the paradigm I have been using to test integration of information for my honors thesis. I have used this paradigm in a variety of projects throughout my three years in the lab, so it seems like second nature to me. However, I realized that I became very frustrated when my participants were not fully understanding what I was asking them during the test phase. 

Kino  Maravillas is a senior who is majoring in Biology. He was awarded a Fall 2018 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on the Milpa soil microbiome under  Dr. Nicole Gerardo .  The philosophy of scientific research is something I’ve always embodied but could never fully express until I entered Emory. Curiosity, gaining an understanding of the complex, interdependent systems that drive our world, has always driven me to read that extra chapter, linger on that leaf blade in the distance for just a few more minutes, and ponder on that lofty thought that you know will eventually lead somewhere solid. This curiosity was always in the back of my mind; coming into Emory, I applied to the  Scholarly Inquiry and Research (SIRE) program knowing I would finally get to apply this with a lab coat donned. Through my freshman and junior years I’ve been exposed to the grit of day-to-day research, from painstakingly formatting data figures to public...