Prior to coming to the CCSF Biotechnology Program, I obtained a B.A. in Ancient Greek and Latin and taught as a Science, Math, and Humanities tutor, a High School Latin teacher and volunteered as a support group facilitator at the Epilepsy Foundation of Northern California. My involvement with the epilepsy community drove my interest in neuroscience and my goal to earn a PhD in computational neuroscience, specializing in epilepsy. I found out about the internship program by carefully digging through the CCSF course catalog and realized that program would offer me an opportunity to intern in neuroscience, which would support my applications to PhD programs in computational neuroscience.

I obtained an internship at UCSF in the Kleen Lab, which investigates the sources of epilepsy within the brain. To further this research I mapped electrode activity with physical symptoms of video EEG in patients having seizures. I wrote algorithms in MATLAB and Python, as well as annotated video EEGs as a time series. I learned how to analyze and visualize intracranial EEG data as it relates to changes in seizure neurophysiology. Through this experience I have gained direct research experience in the field I’m passionate about, including developing the coding knowledge to create my own algorithms to conduct experiments with intracranial EEG data. I hope to validate and further the field of epileptology, specifically in the mapping of seizure symptoms to brain location as I move forward in my education and career.