This summer I am ressearching with Dr. Layla Banihashemi, who is an associate professor in the Psychiatry and Bioengineering departments at Pitt. She leads the Brain Body Stress Lab at the university, which studies the neural implications of early childhood adversity. This summer I am working with Dr. Banihashemi to investigate how different types of discrimination (age, race, socieconomic status, interpersonal, social, etc) can lead to adverse neurological and mental health impacts in an abuse enriched sample of participants. The brain regions that we are focusing on are highly implicated in the stress response of the body, which includes regions like the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST). These regions are part of the limbic system and important for regulating horomone release, and behavorial responses of different stressors. In the lab, participants first fill out a series of questionnaires. These questionnaires provide us information on things like their socioeconomic status, and their traumatic or discriminatory life experiences. Then, the participants are given stress tasks to complete while they are scanned in a MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machine. These stress tasks cause stress pathways in the brain to be activated, and for us to look at brain data to deliniate how differently the stressor evoked pathways in those that have experienced childhood adversity in the brain behave.

To assess how discrimination implicates these pathways specifically, we use the Major Experiences of Discrimination questionnaire in the lab. Over the summer I am working with Dr. Banihashemi to analyze the statistical correlation of discrimination and things like overall life trauma and discrimination.

I am currently a rising junior, majoring in Neuroscience and minoring in Sociology and purusing a Conceptual Foundations of Medicine certificate. I am currently a pre-med, student planning on applying to medical school in the next cycle. As a future physician I want to make sure that I am validating experiences of discrimination and trauma in my patients. I also want to be cognizant of the deep neurological and mental health effects can have on the trajectory of someone’s life. Researching how the brains of those that have been discriminated against in some manner allows me to gain an in-depth understanding of humans and neuroscience as well.

Something unique about myself is that along with neuroscience and medicine, another huge passion of mine is social activism. I have experince in mobilizing youth to protest against the banning of books in my hometown of York, PA. I have been able to write a book and give a TedTalk about my journey with activism since!