Millie is a Neuroscience and Psychology double major at Wellesley College where she worked under Dr. Courtney Marshall studying the underlying pathological mechanisms of Alzheimer’s disease, with a focus on hyperphosphorylated tau.
As an Amgen Scholar, Millie is researching depressive-like states with Dr. Austin Coley. The project Millie is working on uses mice with induced learned helplessness to model depression. Generally about fifty percent of mice are susceptible to become helpless following the stress protocol, the other fifty are deemed resilient. Millie runs behavioral assays including novel object recognition, T-mazes measuring working memory and reward-motivation, and head-fixed pavlovian discrimination which measures learning. Millie uses deep learning animal tracking software SLEAP to establish facial expression analysis as a valid, quantifiable readout for behavioral and emotional states in mice.
The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) has previously been linked with various depressive phenotypes and is a particular region of interest in the Coley Lab. Once behavioral data is collected, the lab will use in vivo 2-photon calcium imaging in the mPFC to study neural substrates and neural population activity differences associated with learned helplessness. Increasing granular understanding of depressive-like states by comparing neural and behavioral activity of stressed-susceptible, stressed-resilient, and control mice, will allow development of more effective treatments for depressive disorders.
Millie would like to thank Dr. Coley, Project Scientist Dr. Safaryan, and the rest of the Coley Lab for their mentorship and unwavering support of her curiosity. She also thanks the Amgen Foundation and UCLA program for providing her this opportunity.