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Hello everyone! My name is Rebecca Woodruff, and I’m a Bryn Mawr pre-health, NBS biology major. I’m doing my senior research with my lab partner, Danielle Marck in the psychology department, supervised by Prof. Earl Thomas. I’ve lived in Austin, Texas for most of my life, but I’ve also lived abroad in Tokyo, Japan and Edinburgh, Scotland. Most of my course interests at Bryn Mawr have focused on biology, sociology, East Asian studies, issues of social justice, and public health. Right now, I plan on taking a year or two off and then attending graduate school to obtain an MA or a PhD in public health.

Right now, my main interests for this course include:

• intersections between the brain, mental healthcare, and education: I worked last summer on an applied neurobiology project in Paul Grobstein’s lab that dealt with this topic.
• anxiety: Danielle and my research focuses on inhibition of anxiety from the medial prefrontal cortex on the amygdala in the white rat. Basically, we infuse an anxiolytic drug into the mpc and record from the amygdala. While I’m really interested in the psychopharmacology related to anxiety, I’m also interested in learning more about anxiety from different perspectives.
• language acquisition later in life, like in school or immersion settings. When I was in high school, I went to live in Japan totally out of the blue and without any prior knowledge of Japanese culture and language and left the country speaking Japanese. I’ve continued studying the language and the problems associated with aging and language acquisition really frustrate (!) and interest me.
• evolutionary neurobiology

I definitely think research in NBS is important for human well being in a general sense. In my experience, as I gained a greater understand of NBS, specifically what Paul called “applied neurobiology”, the more my view of institutions that I had previously taken for granted changed. Last summer, I worked in Paul’s lab on a project that dealt with how understandings of the structure and function of the brain played a role in better understanding methods of education and mental healthcare. At the end of the summer, I walked away from the project with really different ideas about how those two fields are currently operating, and what could be done to improve them. For this reason, I think that making the results of NBS research accessible to others, specifically those who don’t have an understanding of the scientific culture and jargon, could positively impact many other disciplines.