Hello everyone! 

As the summer comes to a close, I look back on my time in the Brackenridge Fellowship. Throughout the fellowship, my perception of research has changed tremendously. Working with my peers for the last few months, discussing our projects, and providing feedback has been incredibly rewarding and beneficial. I have learned a ton about scientific communication and the many approaches that can be used for a project. I appreciated the opportunity to talk about the advances in our projects with my cohort and plan out the next steps to continue making progress. Furthermore, I found that the weekly workshops were incredibly helpful in learning more about the various opportunities that I could pursue as an undergraduate student, and in the future, to continue pursuing my fascination with the research world. From applying for national scholarships to approaching poster presentations to submitting abstracts for scientific journals, my understanding of how this fellowship can act as just one part of my research journey has grown immensely. I hope to use all that I have learned to continue with my project and pursue additional opportunities to perform independent research projects. 

Over the summer, most things went according to plan. However, there were also plenty of challenges and deviations that arose. My project, which involved circadian variations in psychomotor vigilance with the Center for Adolescent Rewards, Rhythms, and Sleep (CARRS) at Pitt, has only grown over the last few months. I initially planned to only look at vigilance as its own factor, looking at how performance on the psychomotor vigilance task changes based on circadian timing. However, through literature review and simply observation, I realized that there are a plethora of other factors that I could use to compare circadian rhythms and vigilance, such as melatonin onset/offset, phase and amplitude of consignor temperature graphs, and even demographic data. Over the course of the summer, I expanded my aims (and hypotheses) to account for those additional variables. I plan to use the next semester to analyze it all through the SPSS Statistics software and finish my thesis!

I found myself learning more than I could have imagined about the neurobiological and developmental variations of circadian and homeostatic rhythms, the history of sleep deprivation studies and many of the behavioral tasks used in my project, and statistical analysis methods. I look forward to continuing exploring this branch of psychiatry with CARRS, and building my personal and professional experiences in scientific research!