NANCY COWDIN

Nancy is a 1980 graduate of the University of Colorado (Boulder); she obtained a BS in Elementary Education and a B.A. in French.  Nancy In 1986, she earned an MS in Environmental Conservation from Colorado State University (Fort Collins).  During her Master's research, she worked for the National Park Service as a water quality researcher, conducting in-field water sampling and in-lab sample filtration, plating and incubation for coliform bacterial analysis.  She also worked as a graduate teaching assistant for the CSU Natural Resources program . Nancy has extensive experience as an elementary and high school science teacher and administrator.  As an advanced placement biology teacher, she provided students with opportunities to conduct biology experiments using sophisticated analytic laboratory equipment.  For her anatomy and physiology classes, she guided students through invertebrate and vertebrate dissections.  She also developed a Neuropsychology course for her students.  More recently, Nancy has assisted with nonhuman primate research in the labs of Dr. Ludise Malkova and Dr. James Gnadt at Georgetown, where she has gained experience with surgical, MRI and behavioral procedures. Nancy is especially interested in neural circuitry  responsible for learning, memory retrieval, and sensory perception.

SONYA DUMANIS

Sonya graduated from Columbia University in 2007 with a BA in Neuroscience and Behavior and a concentration in Mathematics.  Sonya's undergraduate research focused on computational and theoretical modeling.  She worked at a fusion laser lab for three years, co-authoring four papers in Physics of Plasmas.  In addition, she modeled earthquake pathways in Southeast Asia in a seismology lab, and she studied the correlation between activation signals detected by  fMRI in an imaging lab.   While at Columbia, Sonya worked as a research assistant for a neuroimaging project studying the neural bases of cognitive control of emotion and anxiety, and she ran a study on decision-making strategies.  Sonya also worked as a teaching assistant for a course on "Cognition, Memory, and Stress."  After graduation, she took a position as a Neurobiology Research Assistant at USUHS to conduct a collaboration with the Neurogenetics Laboratory at the NIH, under the supervision of Dr. Jack Tsao.  For her research, she has used a variety of molecular and cellular techniques to study Wallerian degeneration in the Wlds mouse model.   Sonya is especially interested in molecular mechanisms of injury and regeneration in the nervous system.

AFREDO GONZALEZ-SULSER

Alfredo graduated in 2005 from the University of Pennsylvania with a BAS in Biology. As an undergraduate, Alfredo first worked in Scott Poethig's plant development lab, studying microRNA silencing of specific genes and assisting with gene cloning. His efforts earned him coauthorship on a 2005 publication in PNAS.  In 2004, he worked in an evolutionary biology lab and spent a semester in Costa Rica conducting field studies on tropical reforestation. Following graduation, Alfredo took a job in the anesthesiology research lab of Dr. Giovanni Cucchiaro at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, where he investigated the antinociceptive effects of the nAChR agonist, epibatidine, using electrophysiological, behavioral, and immunohistochemistry methods.  His research contributed to SfN abstracts presented in 2006 and 2007, and a publication that appeared in the April 2008 issue of the European Journal of Pharmacology, on which he is a coauthor: "Electrophysiologic effects of systemic and locally infused epibatidine on locus coeruleus neurons."  In addition, he and Georgetown’s Dr. Ken Kellar are coauthors on a paper currently in press in Anesthesia titled: "Analgesic Effects of Sazetidine-A: A New Nicotinic Cholinergic Drug."  Alfredo is especially interested in using neuropharmacology to study the molecular and cellular physiology underlying behavior.

ANTHONY (“TJ”) KRAFNICK

TJ received a B.S. in Biology, with a minor in Psychology in May, 2008, from St. Joseph's University in Philadelphia.  His summer research experience with  Dr. Andrew McElrone of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture on plant disease in elevated carbon dioxide and deep root function in trees native to Texas.  He also worked as field research assistant for Dr. McElrone, at a cave site in Texas.  In the context of an experimental techniques course, TJ took on a project to optimize live-cell labeling methods of some yeast-like fungal cells, with the goal of imaging cells expressing GFP-tubulin and also labeling mitochondria and ER with vital stains. In the process, TJ learned to use the software and hardware for 3D image capture on the research light microscope. He also served as Program Director for WSJR Student Radio.  His interest in neuroscience was spurred by classes in behavioral neuroscience, and he is fascinated by neurochemical determinants of brain function and disease. He hopes to have the opportunity to use a diversity of approaches to study normal and abnormal nervous system function.

MARK NIEDRINGHAUS

Mark received a BA in Biology from the University of Virginia in 2003 and an MS in Physiology from Georgetown in 2004.  His first research experience was as a high school student (Thomas Jefferson High in VA) when he worked in the lab of Dr. Richard Gillis at Georgetown.  At UVA, Mark worked in the laboratory of Dr. Scott Zeitlin studying the molecular biology of Huntington's Disease.  He also continued to pursue research in the Gillis lab during the summers, studying vagal- and vago-vagal reflex control of the stomach.   This work resulted in his authorship on publications in J Neuroscience and Am J of Physiol.  Since 2004, Mark has been a full time research assistant in the Gillis lab where he has mentored several high school students, and has published several abstracts as well as a first author paper in the Am J of Physiol on the control of the crural diaphragm by the dorsal motor nucleus of the vagus.  In his spare time, Mark volunteers as a Special Olympics coach.  Mark is especially interested in combining multiple approaches to the study of integrative systems neuroscience.

LAUREN OREFICE

Lauren received a B. A. from Boston College in 2006, with a double major in Biology and Psychology.  After graduation, Lauren worked as lab manager for Dr. Raghu Kalluri  in the Division of Matrix Biology at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, where she studied extracellular matrix and cancer metastasis using a transgenic mouse model. As an undergrad, she conducted research on seizures in mice, first in the lab of Dr. Thomas Seyfried, studying effects of caloric restriction on seizure susceptibility in the EL/Suzuki mouse model, and subsequently in the lab of Dr. Stephen Heinrich for her independent research project.  In the Heinrich lab, Lauren's research contributed to a paper published in 2007 in Brain Research, on which Patrick Forcelli (IPN student) is first author and Lauren is a coauthor.  Lauren also is first author on a paper that has appeared in the Feb 2008 issue of Epilepsy & Behavior: "Paternal care paradoxically increases offspring seizure susceptibility in the El mouse model of epilepsy."  Lauren is especially interested in cellular mechanisms of  neural plasticity during development and following CNS injury.

  PATRICIA (PATTY) WASHINGTON

Patty graduated in 2007 from the University of Virginia School of  Engineering and Applied Science with a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering.  Her coursework ranged from computational and molecular bioengineering, to biomechanics and biomaterials. During the summer of 2006, Patty interned at Empirical Technologies Corp in Charlottesville, collecting data using a novel wrist sensor heart-monitoring device and creating a Matlab program to extract heart rate variability from the data by finding the power spectral density of the beat-to-beat intervals. Patty's senior research at UVA culminated in her capstone/thesis project "Developing a model of non-lethal strangulation for forensics and litigation" and earned her the 2007 Outstanding Individual Capstone Project Award. After graduating, she became a research assistant in the Applied Neurobiology Laboratory of Dr. May Lu at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, studying rodent models of traumatic brain injury.  At WRAIR, Patty performed rodent surgeries, behavioral testing, and data analysis. She also assisted with writing proposals on a wide range of topics, including stem cell therapy, brain hypothermia therapy and preclinical drug development. Patricia is especially interested in neural injury and plasticity, especially in terms of repair and recovery after trauma. She is also interested in expanding the application of her computational skills into the realm of cognitive function and neuroimaging.

RACHEL WURZMAN

Rachel received a BA in Neuroscience (minor in Chemistry) in 2005 from Smith College and an MS in Physiology in 2007 from Georgetown.  Under Dr. Beth Powell at Smith, Rachel conducted independent research on the functional effects of endocannabinoids in the basal ganglia, and assisted Dr. Adam Hall in a study of GABA-A receptors in anesthesia.  Rachel also served as a TA for Physiology of Behavior,  Psychopharmacology, and Research Methods. During the summer of 2003, Rachel interned at the NIH lab of Dr. Judith Walters, studying firing patterns in gobus pallidus of awake rats via chronically implanted electrodes.  In the summer of 2004, Rachel interned with Dr. Mark Hallett at NIH, studying sensory tics in Tourette Syndrome patients, and the effect of 1-Octanol in essential tremor patients. This work earned her an NINDS Exceptional Summer Student Award and coauthorship on a publication in Brain in 2006, "Neural correlates of tic generation in Tourette syndrome: an event-related functional MRI study."  After graduating, she received an IRTA fellowship at NIH to study sensory tics with MEG, presenting her data at the Internat’l Congress of Clinical Neurophysiology in 2006.  More recently, Rachel has worked in the Georgetown Clinical Center for Bioethics, coauthoring articles with Drs. James Giordano and Kevin Fitzgerald. Rachel is fascinated by the neurophysiology and neurochemistry of basal ganglia circuits and hopes to develop unique ways to probe their function as related to movement, perception, attention, and learning in animal models.