Estephanie Balbuena
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Estephanie is a rising junior at Hunter College, The City University of New York, majoring in Psychology and English, and minoring in Biology. This past year she had the opportunity to work in Dr. Serrano’s Lab, under Dr. Alliger’s mentorship, where she assisted in researching the relationship between methamphetamine consumption and hippocampal plasticity. Neuroscience research soon became a career aspiration that led her to be awarded the NIH-BP-ENDURE Neuroscience research scholarship. As an ENDURE Scholar, she was appointed to conduct research in Dr.Monk’s Translational and Developmental Neuroscience Lab at the University of Michigan. Dr. Monk afforded her the opportunity to design a research study that focused on the relationship between stress response to an emotionally valenced fMRI task and brain activation. One of her main research goals is to further her interest in the research of neural networks in the brain with relation to the physiological effects associated with internalizing mood disorders. Estephanie plans to pursue a PhD in cognitive neuroscience.
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