NeuroBlitz Competition
NeuroFest 2021
Healthy Brain, Healthy Mind:
Progress in Mental Health Research
NeuroBlitz challenges our graduate students to summarize their research in a concise and succinct manner, similar to an elevator pitch, for the general audience.
Join us for this friendly competition and help vote for your favorite! The student with the most votes wins a $100 Award.
March 12 NeuroBlitz Contestants
Rethinking Psychedelics
Lindsay Cameron is a fifth-year neuroscience graduate student, studying the therapeutic effects of psychedelic compounds in the lab of Dr. David Olson. When not in the lab, you can find her climbing mountains, backpacking, or playing with her cats in the garden.
Walking with Autism
Stela Petkova trains in the lab of Dr. Jill Silverman at the MIND Institute. Working primarily with mouse models of genetic neurodevelopmental disorders including Angelman and Dup15q Syndromes, she is interested in the commonalities of autism, intellectual disability, and epilepsy. Stela is particularly passionate about studying motor behaviors as robust and readily translational to human research.
Eavesdropping on Neural Chitchat to Learn about Motivation
Alexa D'Ambra is a fourth-year Ph.D. student in Dr. Diasynou Fioravante's lab. She studies the cerebellum, a historically motor structure, and how it influences non-motor brain circuits that are important for motivation, learning, and addiction. Her research uses a range of techniques that probe everything from how individual cells behave in a circuit to how different circuits influence animal behavior.
March 13 NeuroBlitz Contestants
Something Old, Something New: Studying New Neurons in the Old Brain
Olga Vafaeva joined the UC Davis neuroscience Ph.D. program in 2018 and currently trains in the lab of Dr. Elva Diaz. She studies the generation of new neurons in the adult hippocampus and how this process is altered with age.
Untangling the Immune Response during Neurodegeneration
Kaitryn Ronning is a senior neuroscience Ph.D. candidate in the neuroscience program at UC Davis. During her time at Susquehanna University, where she received a B.S. in biology and a B.A. in music, Kaitryn realized she was fascinated by the intersection of cellular biology, disease biology, and genetics. Now, working in Dr. Marie Burns' lab, Kaitryn uses a combination of high-throughput genetic techniques, cellular imaging, and more to improve our understanding of the role immune cells play during health and disease in the central nervous system.
Searching for Regulatory DNA in Psychiatric Disease
Tracy Warren joined the UC Davis neuroscience Ph.D. program in 2018 after graduating from UC Berkeley with a psychology degree and subsequently working in a psychiatry lab at UCSF. As a graduate student in Dr. Alex Nord's lab, Tracy is highly interested in understanding how genomic regulation of biological pathways in the brain results in the development of psychiatric disease. She is an avid fan of anything coffee, linguistics, or Harry Potter, and in her spare time, you can catch her hanging out on her balcony with her burgeoning vegetable garden.