Margot is a rising senior, majoring in Biochemistry and minoring in Mathematics, at Mount Holyoke College. There, they have worked in the lab of Dr. Kathryn McMenimen since September 2020, where they are performing a holistic screening of heat shock protein induction in response to tau aggregation in D. melanogaster in order to study how tauopathies disrupt the chaperone response. As an Amgen Scholar at UCLA, Margot is working in the Bitan lab in the department of Neurology. This lab studies the abnormal self-association of proteins and their role in human diseases. Margot’s project focuses specifically on the role of brain-derived exosomes in the tau seeding process. Indeed, tauopathies are a major class of neurodegenerative diseases caused by the misfolding of tau protein. Interestingly, they do not progress randomly through the brain but rather via specific disease-dependent neural networks. It is believed that exosomes, a type of extracellular vesicle that play an integral role in cell-cell communication, can act as vehicles for the disease-associated proteins between cells in the central nervous system. As a result, Margot is using fluorescent microscopy and flow cytometry to investigate whether exosomes from different brain regions and cell types possess discrete tau seeding capabilities in order to gain a better understanding of the progression of these diseases. Margot would like to thank the Bitan lab for their guidance and support, as well as the Amgen Foundation for providing them with this opportunity.