I am a graduate student in the UW Neuroscience Graduate Program. Broadly, I’m interested in the interactions of sleep and circadian rhythm with memory, mood, and neurological and psychiatric diseases. My current focus is at the intersection of sleep and epilepsy. My thesis project involves studying sleep and circadian rhythm disturbances in a genetic mouse model of Dravet syndrome, a form of childhood epilepsy accompanied by severe developmental delays and cognitive deficits. By selectively targeting the mutation that causes Dravet syndrome to neuronal populations involved in regulating sleep, I aim to characterize the mechanisms underlying these disturbances in Dravet patients. As a Graduate Fellow at the UW Institute for Neuroengineering, I am developing a novel closed-loop system for selective long-term manipulations of sleep stages and seizures in the Dravet syndrome model to better understand the interactions between the circadian system and epilepsy, in collaboration with our postdoc Carlos Caldart. With Maca Aloi in Gwenn Garden’s lab, I am also looking at the role of microglia-mediated neuroinflammation in sleep disturbances and seizures in the context of Alzheimer’s Disease. Finally, I assist Leandro Casiraghi with the Sleep and Homelessness project and conduct interviews with our participants as a way to increase public awareness about the health disparities faced by people experiencing homelessness around Seattle.
I graduated from the University of Arizona in 2015 with a B.S. in Neuroscience & Cognitive Science. Outside the lab, I like playing music, writing and getting outdoors.