As we end our first Ashley Hall Neuroscience Summer Institute, I find myself amazed at the incredible amount of information we have learned and the amazing science we have been exposed to during our two weeks. The 8 girls that attended the program were an impressive and motivated group of young women!
The first week was incredible, we visited the sleep lab and Ann Hill was hooked up the many monitors and we watched her brain waves. We have visited the stroke center and performed inter-cranial dopplers on each other to view the arteries in the brain and how they are using this technology to help save lives, while there, we also learned the ins and outs of stroke and the amazing REACH technology we have at MUSC. We have learned about many different research projects and made slides of mouse brains to view next week. We learned how MRI's work and have visited the animal and human MRI centers and actually go to do an MRI on one of our presenters. Today we attended the MUSC Neuroscience conferences, brain tumor boards and learned about aneurisms and got to see firsthand many of the daily activities of surgeons, neurologists and residents. We have had lectures on mirror neurons, addiction research, brain tumors and many more. Needless to say, we are all overwhelmed with knowledge and the girls have been amazing.
To start off our second week we spent the morning with the neurosurgery department learning about consciousness, brain function and what it takes to become a neurosurgeon. We were introduced to the epileptic brain and the girls impressed everyone with their ability to analyze case studies and interpret EEG data! Dr. Patel answered our many questions and shared fascinating stories with us! We dissected sheep brains at Ashley Hall and got to handle the structures we had been hearing so much about. Researchers shared their knowledge and passions with us about addiction, sex differences in neuroscience and we even performed a Western Blot to separate proteins and see how scientists can analyze animal models. The clinical and psychological aspect of neuroscience was presented to us and we performed a battery of neuropsychological tests on one another! To culminate our two weeks of creating new neural connections, we went to the College of Charleston to perform electrophysiology on crayfish. Not only did we get to see action potentials from a neuron on screen but we got to hear the pop of a nerve firing as well! We held human brains and spinal cords in our hands, and truly understood what we were seeing and why it is so amazing! The girls presented case studies that they had researched throughout the program on the final day. Dr. Elena Vazay joined us for the presentations and was highly impressed with the level of knowledge the girls demonstrated in their presentations. This was such an incredible experience for everyone involved. I am so proud of the girls for their hard and look forward to seeing them share their knowledge of the nervous system!
Meghan Ward
Upper school Biology,
AP Biology, Oceanography