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Fall 2024: I started reaching out to researchers in many different fields. At first, I was focused on superconductors and nuclear fusion, but gradually transitioned into looking at biophysics and neural oscillations. I had always been interested in schizophrenia, and I started looking at neural oscillation deficits in patients with schizophrenia in relation to their hallucinations.
Spring 2025: I reached out to Dr. Jessica Hua from UCSF after reading her paper on mismatched negativity and theta oscillation deficits during auditory hallucinations. We met, and she agreed to be my mentor. Now, I am working with her on her research project through the VA/UCSF.
Summer 2025: I worked with Dr. Hua to analyze data collected from a study (NAPLS3) looking at young adults who are at clinical high-risk for psychosis (CHR-P) and their social and behavioral determinants of health (SBDH). I investigated the relationship between SBDHs, global brain metrics obtained through FreeSurfer, and conversion to psychosis/difference between HC and CHR-P through t-tests. We realized that most of the NAPLS3 data has already been published, except for the Life Events section of the SBDH questionnaire, which is what I will be focusing on. I also worked to harmonize data across different sites to account for site/scanner differences through a program called ComBat.
Fall 2025:
August-September: I am submitting a poster abstract to present at the American Psychiatric Association's annual conference in May of 2026. My mentor and I will continue on to part two of our project by adding in brain age gap variable in our analysis, along with looking at correlations between different SBDH components.
October: I automated with process of running regression and z-score analysis. We are also going to rerun the brain age gap analysis to see if using a different program will yield better results.
Winter 2025/2026:
November-December: I am now done with my independent data analysis and am moving on to the second/broader part of my mentor's research project. We are running Categorial PCA on all collected social determinant metrics to identify relationships between different categories of life events/trauma. We will then examine the association between those categories and brain structure in CHR-P.
January: My poster was accepted for the APA conference, so I will be presenting on May 16th!
Spring 2026:
February-April: I continued working with my mentor on our data analysis, and we ended up having to rerun most of our CATPCA models and correlations with brain metrics because some of our SDOH variables we included, like trauma, did not have enough data to be included. We also chose to exclude healthy controls from our CATPCA models because there were so few healthy controls, and their range of SDOH exposures was significantly lower than CHR experiences. I also placed 4th in the Golden Gate STEM fair. I've attached my poster.
May 16th: We finally cleaned up our CATPCA models and were able to find significant correlations between our SDOH domains and brain age gap, the amygdala, the hippocampus, and total cortical volume.
I presented our findings at the APA conference, which was such an amazing opportunity to share my research and connect with other researchers, psychiatrists, and medical students in the field.
May 26th: I presented my research at the MARC colloquium along with my MARC class. This was a very nerve-racking but rewarding process, and it was so cool to see how 2 years' worth of work has come together for everyone.
Future: Even though my time in MARC has come to an end, I will be continuing my work with Dr. Hua until the end of this research project. We plan to submit for publication by the end of this year. Being a part of the MARC program has been an incredible journey and has inspired (and thoroughly convinced) me to pursue scientific research in higher education and beyond as I study physics in college and hopefully pursue a career in the medical field.
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