Research

​During my freshman year, I felt so lucky to start as an undergraduate researcher for the Moorjani Lab. We engineer strategies for promoting motor plasticity and repair for chronic spinal cord injuries. I work with the rats to determine their handedness, train them to properly reach and grasp a pellet (the task), and perform health checks. This is done to determine their pre-injury scores for the task, which will be compared to their post-injury scores to determine if the treatment for promoting motor plasticity and repair was effective. I have included pictures of our lab setup, including their arenas and the table on the right that we use for health checks. Fun fact: rats do not see red light! This is important because they are on a cycle to control for the timing of the day. While we are training them, they are often on their dark cycle. To account for this, the lab rooms use red light since this allows us to see them for training and health checks, but allows the rats to stay on their dark cycle. 

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I felt so lucky to start as an undergraduate researcher for the Moorjani Lab.

 

During my sophomore year, I started my own independent project in my lab, looking at the strength of neural connections between the central nervous system and forearm muscles following a spinal cord injury in a rat model. To accomplish this, I learned the art of designing a corticomuscular implant with the help of research scientists in my lab. This implant contains cortical microelectrodes that deliver stimulation to the brain's motor regions and other wires that are placed into forearm muscles to record electromyography (EMG) data. We are looking at a specific EMG response known as an evoked potential throughout 18 weeks following the injury. If the evoked potential increases in amplitude, this would indicate a strengthening of the corticomuscular connection between the central nervous system and forearm muscles. These experiments will establish a high-sensitivity metric for quantifying the electrophysiological mechanisms behind motor repair.

 

I started collecting data using the Neurochip 3, which is a brain-computer interface that was designed at UW by research scientists who work in or with my lab. It is very convenient to use this technology since, when I have questions, I can meet with the scientists who helped develop it, and they know exactly how to help me troubleshoot. I have included what my setup looks like. The Neurochip is composed of 4 green circuit boards that interface with an orange amphenol, which connects to a long cable that clips into the corticomuscular implant in the rat's brain. The Neurochip is turned on by connecting a battery and is able to stimulate and record through its 20 channels. We are hoping to record evoked potentials using small currents, but so far, we are still fine-tuning our implant design and data collection protocols. I was told this project had a steep learning curve, and I feel like I have already learned so much despite our lack of data. Electrophysiology is quite more complex than I expected, but working on this project while enrolled in PHYS115: Electricity & Magnetism has really helped me contextualize my coursework in a neuroscience lab setting. I have learned so much about circuits this quarter, from the ideal RC Circuit in my physics class to the circuits involved in the Neurochip, to how our nervous system sometimes acts as a circuit. The same principles of resistance, capacitance, and current are applicable in every case.

 

Working on this project while enrolled in PHYS115: Electricity & Magnetism has really helped me contextualize my coursework in a neuroscience lab setting.

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In my junior year, I started a new project assessing motivation levels after spinal cord injury. We discovered that motivation levels drop post-injury and remain low even when motor function recovers. I was grateful to be working on a multidisciplinary topic, addressing both the physical and psychological impacts associated with spinal cord injury. Now, as a senior, I am the first author on the paper for the motivation project. I also decided to use this project for my departmental honors requirements. Research has been a part of my UW experience each year, and it seems to serve as a great reminder of how far I've come. Freshman year, I was filled with so much awe that I could participate in research, and now I am confidently writing and publishing a paper on my project. I am proud of my commitment to the Moorjani lab and all the ways it's helped me expand upon my coursework, gain lab experiences, practice in surgical settings, and collaborate with spinal cord injury experts. 

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I am proud of my commitment to the Moorjani lab and all the ways it's helped me expand upon my coursework, gain lab experiences, practice in surgical settings, and collaborate with spinal cord injury experts.