Joyce Woo
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Joyce graduated from New York University with Bachelor in Science in Neural Science and minor in Chemistry. She is particularly interested in infant neurobiology and attachment, and have spent much of my time investigating both human and animal development.
She worked on on her senior thesis in Dr. Regina Sullivan’s lab at NYU Child Development Center, exploring the neurobiology of early life adversity. During her time in the Sullivan lab, she have developed a close working relationship with postdoc mentor Maya Opendak, who introduced her to the Local Field Potential project, a collaborative project investigating the effects of a naturalistic maternal abuse paradigms on neural oscillations in rodent pups using electrophysiological recordings. She provided updates on data analysis from BORIS ethology software based on video recordings of mother and pup interactive behavior. She worked at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee in the lab of Kathryn Humphreys, PhD, studying stress and early human development. There, she tasked to learn infant functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging techniques. Using an existing neuroimaging processing interface, Nipype, which is an extension of Python, my role is to optimize quality control and preprocessing steps for infant brain data. She examined the associations of prenatal stress on the hippocampus, amygdala, and white matter connections between the medial prefrontal cortex and the amygdala during infant neurodevelopment. Working across species has allowed Her to address and ask complementary questions about how to implement basic science research into translational medicine. She is interested in epigenetic regulation of neural gene expression specifically looking at histone modifications associated with early-life caregiving experiences – particularly maltreatment. She hopes to one day be the first in her family to attain a PhD, and to become a principal investigator at a research-1 institution. |