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I’m just barely starting my Ph.D, so there’s still a lot of possibilities for what I’ll be doing for the next 5 years!

But in general, I’m looking at which brain cells and which areas of the brain are important for the good feelings (like the pleasure of eating a candy bar)!  Brain cells, or neurons, fire electrical signals to each other, and there are a ton of ways we can study their firing in mice to find out how it works in humans. One tool I’ll be using actually makes these neurons glow when they fire! With this, I can literally see which brain cells are firing while mice are walking around!

The lovely thing about being in science is that you don’t have a typical job where you do the same thing all day over and over. A lot of times, a typical day really depends on what needs to be done!

Probably the majority of my days is preparing for experiments and looking at the measurements of these experiments. Different types of experiments – from ones that are just watching how the mouse is acting to those where I inject liquid into the brain – all answer different types of questions, and it can get pretty complicated to try and figure out what’s actually going on!