Marcos Moliné is a rising third-year neurobiology student at UCSD, working in the Molina Lab at UCSD Health, where they study mitochondrial dysfunction and its relation to healthy aging. As part of the UCLA Amgen Scholars program, Marcos is working in Dr. Richard Staba’s Lab. His project focuses on analyzing the effects of the potential drug treatments, deferiprone and levetiracetam, in preventing epileptogenesis after traumatic brain injury (TBI). Because the onset of epilepsy can take months to years to occur in humans after TBI, Marcos’ project uses rats as an animal model. TBI is induced, and high frequency oscillations, interictal spikes, and seizures are monitored as biomarkers during the acute period (14 days) following TBI.  Currently, anti-seizure medications such as levetiracetam are prescribed to epileptic patients to treat their seizures. However, this drug only prevents symptoms. Therefore, there is a need for a treatment to prevent epileptogenesis after TBI, especially considering that 15-50% of patients who experience TBI develop epilepsy. Deferiprone has been identified as a possible anti-epileptogenic treatment because it is an iron chelator and will metabolize potentially harmful iron released in the brain due to bleeding. The lab hypothesizes that a combination of deferiprone and levetiracetam will reduce the observed biomarkers, indicating increased potential as an anti-epileptogenic treatment, which can be further studied in clinical trials. Marcos is very grateful to Dr. Richard Staba and Dr. Cesar Santana-Gomez for their mentorship this summer, as well as to the Amgen Foundation and UCLA for giving him this opportunity.