Hikari is a graduated senior from Vassar College who majored in Neuroscience and Behavior. There, Hikari was an undergraduate researcher in Dr. Lori Newman’s laboratory, which studies astrocyte metabolism via glutamate synthetase while rats are undergoing sustained attention tasks.   As an Amgen Scholar at UCLA, Hikari is working in the laboratory of Dr. Amy Rowat and under the mentorship of Kathleen Chen. Her project focuses on developing artificial meat, which is particularly salient as traditional meat production is detrimental to the environment and may be insufficient for a growing, global food demand. To construct palatable artificial meat, fat and adipocytes are necessary to mimic the flavor of cooked meat. Adipocytes must be differentiated and proliferated, and these cells depend on physical and mechanical properties of the matrix to direct their development. For the best study of adipocyte development, 3D culture models, such as cultures grown on microbeads, should be used yet little research exists on scalable, adipocyte cell cultures in 3D models. Hikari’s project studies how adipocytes differentiate and proliferate on polyacrylamide microbeads of different stiffnesses and hopes to identify an ideal stiffness for adipocyte growth. This research is invaluable for optimizing scalable adipocyte development to construct palatable artificial meat with fat.   Hikari would like to thank the Amgen Scholars program at UCLA for this opportunity, and Dr. Amy Rowat and Kathleen Chen for their patience and dedication to providing guidance, despite conducting her research remotely.