Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Student (Summer 2018)
“During the summer of 2018, I worked at the Center for Injury Research and Prevention (CIRP) as a part of the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program under the mentorship of Dr. Elizabeth Walshe and Chelsea Ward McIntosh. My team and I worked on several projects where I gained an abundance of skills that I will bring back to my home university as I continue doing research. Both projects involved providing more information on adolescent drivers and their cognition. We worked with the Diagnostic Driving’s portable simulator where we used cognitive assessments on a variety of variables and surveys to see how they relate to participants' driving performance on the driving simulator. We also worked on a project involving magnetoencephalography (MEG) to map brain activity while probing cortical responses through engagement and complexity of the drives.
Through both our projects, we hope to determine an individual’s neurocognitive state and safeness for driving using various tools. Throughout the summer I learned how to use SPSS, E-Prime, RedCap and other methods that I will utilize as I advance into my career.
I am a rising junior at California State University, Northridge majoring in Psychology. My career plans include obtaining an MD-PhD in Neuroscience. Being an REU intern at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has opened me up to all the possible career options there are in the world of medicine and research. I look forward to seeing what my future brings in light of this experience, and I hope to return to CHOP one day.”