Gillian Thornton

Hello to anyone who has happened across my blog. Thanks for visiting The PTSDetails: Brain Plasticity and Chronic Stress. This is where I will be documenting my progress through my Senior Project. An explanation of my project can be found in my Senior Project Proposal but I’ll do my best to introduce you to it briefly in this blog post.

As a BASIS Scottsdale senior, I will be going off campus during the third trimester of school (from around February 6^th to April 14^th) and interning in a lab at ASU. I am lucky to be working in Dr. Cheryl Conrad’s lab, Behavioral Neuroscience Research in Stress. The purpose of their research is to look at inhibitory cellular circuitry on chronic stress and resilience. Working towards this goal, Dr. Conrad and her team have published many research papers (a good chunk of which are available on their website which I have linked above).

Before my initial interview I read one that I found particularly interesting titled “Chronic stress enhanced fear memories are associated with increased amygdala zif268 mRNA expression and are resistant to reconsolidation.” The title sounds quite scary (and I commend you if you made it through the whole thing) but how I’d summarize it is they studied rat models for PTSD, pairing Pavlovian fear conditioning with chronic stress, to investigate the mechanisms underlying fear memory formation, extinction, and re-consolidation. They hoped to understand how a robust fear memory can be weakened so that a previously traumatic memory can become less distressing. I’d really recommend checking out that research paper if you’d like to get an idea of the work they will be doing while I’m interning.

Now, more specifically about me, my main activities as an intern (exactly as they were documented in order to be approved to work in the lab) will be working closely with a graduate student, picking up, holding, and weighing mice, assisting putting mice in restraints, cutting perfused and fixed brain, and using a microscope to look at brain slices. So what does that mean exactly? Basically, I’m going to be helping out when and wherever needed and absorbing as much experience as I can. This will be my first real time in a lab so I am really excited to get started and am happy that I will be able to document my thought process as I go along.

I’ve always been really interested in Biology and Psychology. And, being a high school student, I’ve had my fair share of stress. Throughout my high school career I have found that knowing your optimal stress balance is essential to succeeding (you want enough so that you are driven to work hard, but not too much so that you avoid burning out). Therefore, working in a lab that focuses primarily on stress coincides perfectly with my interests. I’m really excited to begin, and, if you’d like to follow along, feel free to subscribe by email to receive updates (a gadget to do so is off to the side). Thanks for reading!