The Researcher
The same instinct that puts a camera in my hands is what drew me to science: a compulsion to look closely at things most people walk past. As a kid I was curious about the world at scales too small to see. Eventually I found my way to a microscope, and that curiosity became a PhD.
I am a PhD Candidate in Cell and Developmental Biology at Vanderbilt University, working in Dr. Vivian Gama's lab. My research asks how a single protein, DRP1, shapes the way human neurons develop, and what goes wrong when it doesn't work. The disease I study, EMPF1, is a rare epileptic encephalopathy caused by mutations in this protein. To model it, I generate human neurons directly from patient-derived stem cells and use CRISPR/Cas9 to engineer the mutations we want to study.
Before Vanderbilt I spent three years as a Research Assistant at Case Western Reserve University, building iPSC models of ALS and epileptic encephalopathy, work that contributed to a publication in EMBO Molecular Medicine. I also presented at an interdepartmental motor neuron meeting at CWRU, which was my first real taste of sharing science with a room full of people who cared about the same questions.
What connects the lab to the lens is simple: both ask you to be patient, to look carefully, and to find the frame that makes something invisible, visible.
Vanderbilt
Cell & Developmental Biology
4.0
Graduate GPA
4 Papers
Published & in review
3× Award
Vanderbilt Imaging Competitions
