Alex is a rising senior at UCLA majoring in Neuroscience and Design | Media Arts. Since his sophomore year, he has been performing research with Dr. Sotiris Masmanidis’s Lab at UCLA to study the neural mechanisms involved in reward learning and movement. During the UCLA Amgen Scholars Program, Alex is investigating the behavioral and electrophysiological characteristics of gait and locomotion in healthy and Parkinson-like model mice. Gait impairments are characteristic of cognitive decline and some neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s Disease (PD). PD pathology includes symptoms such as dopaminergic neuron death in neural circuits involving the basal ganglia and implicated in proper movement modulation. Preliminary data from the Masmanidis Lab has demonstrated basal ganglia neural encoding for limb gait parameters in healthy mice and disruption of such neural firing in neurotoxin Parkinson-like mice models. However, such neurotoxin models, such as induced dopaminergic neuron death with 6-hydroxydopamine, do not fully characterize PD pathology, such as development of misfolded α-synuclein aggregates including Lewy bodies and Lewy neurites. Using computational ethology for behavioral gait tracking and electrophysiological recordings of the basal ganglia, Alex is exploring gait in healthy mice and mice injected with pathological α-synuclein in the basal ganglia to quantify the behavioral and neurological deficits associated with PD. Alex would like to thank the UCLA Amgen Scholars Program, the Amgen Foundation, and the Masmanidis Lab for the opportunity and their support in his growth as a researcher and scientist.