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Hi everyone!

My name is Marissa and I am an NBS biology major at Bryn Mawr with a minor in anthropology and an interest in public health. I am from the Midwest and am currently doing my thesis research with Earl Thomas on anxiety in rats and working to elucidate the ways in which the medial prefrontal cortex affects and/or works with the amygdala in controling anxiety. I am currently planning on taking a year off to hopefully do some kind of work in public health or the non-profit sector before going to medical school to study either pediatrics or public health (or both?).

At the moment I am very interested in the ways in which the brain can compensate for damage or problems and still function normally, such as in children who have hemispherectomies, and the ways in which the brain is not able to compensate. I am also intrigued by the huge varieties of ways that the brain is different between individual people. If there is indeed a large variation between one person and another, how can we make any kinds of assumptions from research, especially if it is performed on animal models. What level of variation is "not important" and to what extent our brains are unique, and what these differences mean.

I think it is extremely important to continue studing animal models to understand the human brain, but it is also necessary to develop better ways to image and study the human brain itself. There are so many instances where studies have shown animal models to behave very differently than humans and we are not able to generalize all of the time. However, better ways of looking at the human brain will hopefully help in some ways to deal with this issue to some extent.

One more thing--we had talked last Tuesday about differences between brains relating to anti-depressants, and the next dayI read this article about a possible genetic componant that causes these differences. They talked about "personalized antidepressant treatment according to genetic makeup" that seems a very interesting way to think about the brain, but would the drug companies go for it?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22804481/