Duke University | Howard Hughes Undergraduate Program

The best part about working in a lab with tons of mice and studying their behavior is that I never really know a day's schedule exactly until I get to the lab in the mornings. Mostly it's because mice are fickle, fickle, creatures. If a fire alarm goes off in the morning, the mice are way too startled to run any meaningful tests, especially when most of what I've been doing is testing mice for their startle responses. Last week, the fire alarm went off in LSRC twice in one day! (Altough our lab probably has to take the blame for one of the fire alarms going off -- opening the autoclave before the cycle finishes and it cools off = a large puff of smoke=very bad idea).

One of the tests that I've been helping doing is PPI, which basically consists shoving mice in and out of chambers in boxes that cost as much as a decent BMW. The test itself takes about 25 minutes, during which the machine takes over the experiment, provided that it's programmed correctly, for which I'm not responsible. So, there's a lot of "down time" during the day, the majority of which I use to read papers online. At first it was like translating Latin armed with only an inadequate dictionary and no knowledge of grammar, but the more I read, the more the information makes sense, like fitting pieces of information in a framework that I've constructed in my mind.

Hi everyone! I call myself Lavender, a rough translation of my Chinese name, and I'm a rising senior at Cedar Ridge. Coming from a family whose never had a single person pursue anything outside of STEM fields, I'm naturally inclined towards the sciences, but I do have other interests: piano, flute, swimming, art history, shopping, viticulture, and languages. Anyways, I've always wanted to get a feel for what doing research, not the go on the internet and copy/paste sentences for essay assignments kind of research, but research that would have a practical use. So I applied to the HH progam and was (am) absolutely ecstatic to have gotten in to the program.

The lab I'm working in is headed by Dr. William Wetsel, who gave me the impression of being very very busy and intelligent but still caring; however my mentor is Dr. Ramona Rodriguiz, who is an amazing walking encyclopedia of anything and everything that has to do with schizophrenia. I'm going to be learning about the biochemical changes in the brain that underlie schizophrenia and the pharmacology of alleviating the symptoms of schizophrena; my first couple of days in the lab were spent nearly drowning in published papers about schizophrenia and incessantly asking Ramona questions, which eventually pulled me out from the deep end. So far, I've met Caroline, an awesome Korean power girl who just graduated from Duke and is working in the lab to get a feel for where she wants to take her career, and Santowana, a kind and beautiful Nepalese woman who makes sure the mice are healthy and content. There is also Dipendra, Chris and Peter who I haven't met yet beyond an introduction but would like to in the future.
 

Specifically about what I've learned about schizophrenia:

1. Imbalance of dopamine in the brain is linked to schiz.

2. Deficiency in glutamergic function is linked to schiz.

3. Schiz is not present in an indiviual from birth like Down syndrome is.

4. But, it is linked with genetics--if a twin has schizophrenia, then the other twin has a 50% chance of developing the disease.

5. At some point in human evolution, schiz might have provided an adaptive advantage for some individuals.

Today Ramona took time from her incredibly busy schedule filled with coordinating the lab, running experiments, and making sure the move from an old lab to new is carried out perfectly. Even before the interview I gathered an impression of an accomplished and indefatigable woman from Ramona and the interview only cemented the impression.
Ramona's father is a physicist who was involved with the marines and her interest in science began when she was extremely young. As a little girl Ramona went to hear Jane Goodall give a speech during one of her earlier tours of America and was intrigued by it. Later, Ramona continued to take advanced science courses (AP bio, chem, physics) in high school and took care of most of the intro level requirements for college. She obtained a triple major in forensics, anthropology and archaeology while doing independent studies in 6 different classical languages including Greek, Latin, and Hieroglyphics. Isn't that a phenomenal feat? Since she has so many different intests, Ramona said that she did have a hard time choosing a field to pursue but ultimately things fell into place for her.

Ramona did most of her work in her earlier undergrad years in forensics and didn't immerse herself in behavioral until the forensics lab at her college was downsized and she voluntarily chose to introduce herself to another field. One of her favorite projects, looking from the perspective of when she was doing the project, is doing field work to study the behavior of newly hatched ducklings to understand their behavior later in life. However, she no longer does field research, but Ramona says she enjoyed her time as a field biologist. After her undergraduate years, Ramona committed to the same lab for 5 years, even following her mentor/employer to Charleston, which she says is a town with a very distinctive character. Later in graduate school, she studied behavioral pharmacology and obtained her Ph.D. from UNC-Chapel Hill.

Today, Ramona is carrying out research about Circadian rhythm along with a number of projects that include schizophrenia and, in the future, more extensive research on PTSD. With her project about Circadian rhythm, she is combining a passion for physics with behavioral studies. When asked about does she ever regret not going into physics as her chosen field, she candidly said that yes, on very bad days, she does. But she also adds that had she gone into particle physics, she might have the same thoughts about behavioral studies.

In her spare time Ramona reads books about physics (antimatter and time) and discusses it with her father. She doesn't read any nonfiction books and her TV scanning is strictly located within scientific or historic channels. However, her interest in movies is as diverse as the species of organisms in the world, even though she rarely watches movies in the theatre-the last one she saw in a theatre was Braveheart, more than a decade ago! But on Wednesday, while her cute 1/4 (?) Rottweiler is getting groomed, she will possibly be treating herself to a much deserved break at the movies.