Akron Life October 2022

EDUCATION

TOP OF MIND Here’s what some of this year’s summer institute undergraduate fellows researched. • Alaya Kiser , a neuroscience major, studied the effects of spi nal cord injuries on sexual and bladder functions. • Speech pathology and audiol ogy major Gabrielle Williams researched adolescent auditory perception. • Samantha Zaborowski , a psy chology and neuroscience major, studied how elementary school kids learn about fractions larger than whole numbers and how pro cedural and conceptual learning methods affect understanding. • Medical technology major Zoha Shaikh researched mechanisms

Angela Ridgel, the associate director of the institute and professor of health sciences, has used it for her research related to Parkinson’s disease. She has brought in bicycles, created in collaboration with engineers, to study the effect of controlled movement on function in Parkinson’s patients. The neuroimaging collabora tory, which features multifluo rescent microscopes, has been used by one student who is mapping out different neu rons in healthy animals versus animal models of disease. And the light sheet microscope has been used for research ranging from spinal cord injuries to reproductive issues. Lique Coolen, the director of the neuroimaging collabora tory and professor of biologi cal sciences, has used the light sheet microscope to study

how to improve function in spinal cord injury patients, and Lehman and Aleisha Moore, an assistant profes sor of biological sciences and institute faculty member, used it to study the location of neurons in the hypothalamus that’s involved in reproduc tion and see if there were functional differences. “In addition to serving faculty, bringing them together, we also want to train students,” Lehman says. “We want to get students that kind of interdis ciplinary perspective.” Staff members have trained some students to use the light sheet microscope, including Lehman’s daughter, a high schooler in a College Credit Plus program who is now a sophomore at Kent State and was trained by Moore while conducting research.

Students are involved in pro fessors’ research in the collabo ratories, and other examples of student research done by the institute’s undergraduate fellows are projects focused on topics like auditory perception, learning methods, neurodegen erative diseases and more. “This is really assembling a world-class group of scientists, studying different aspects of normal brain function and relationships with disease,” Lehman says. “Kent State has this great tradition, essentially, of training students who’ve gone on to really contribute a lot in terms of our under standing of brain health and neuroscience.” The Brain Health Research Institute hosts the 10th annual neuroscience sympo sium Oct. 27 and 28. kent. edu/brainhealth

involved in mitochondrial impairment in neurodegen erative disease and worked to identify potential therapies.

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