Beatriz de la Rea
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Beatriz is a senior majoring in Neural Science at New York University. Her research interests range from mechanisms behind learning and memory to sensory effects on behavior. She will be in Dr. Katherine Nagel’s lab in the Fall of 2021 at NYU Langone, where they are interested in how animals navigate through complex multi-sensory environments and how brains are organized to effectively combine competing cues that drive behavior. She will be working with Hannah Gattuso, using Drosophila as the model organism to study motor motifs underlying olfactory navigation and identify their associated neuronal activity. During Summer 2021, she worked closely with Amanda Iglesias in Dr. Shelly Flagel’s lab at the University of Michigan, researching the role of orexinergic neurons in the lateral hypothalamus to paraventricular nucleus of the thalamus pathway in encoding incentive value in rats. The goal of this research was to gain an understanding of reward-cue learning and its effects on maladaptive behavior, such as addiction. Through this research experience, she has been exposed to skills such as immunofluorescence, multiple behavior paradigms, brain surgery, rat handling, perfusions, and brain slicing. This research furthered her interest in the intersection of Behavioral, Cellular & Molecular, and Systems neuroscience and her goal of pursuing a PhD degree in Neuroscience.
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