Salk Institute scientist visits US Neuroscience
The Neuroscience classes had the opportunity to hear from a Salk Institute scientist about her work on the development of neural stem cells.
The opportunity grew out of an inquiry initiated by senior, Megan Higganbotham. Megan talks about how she got into contact with Dr. Krishna Vadodaria:
I have always felt that the experience and stories of experts in their fields that they can tell to students to guide them on their journeys are vital ingredients to the growth of the classroom. Often times in my neuroscience class, we listen to podcasts and interviews of scientists studying the mechanisms of cell function in the brain and it often feels surreal. One such interview was with Dr. Fred Gage. He managed to shake the world of neuroscience by challenging and proving wrong the dogma that there’s no new neuron growth in the brain. That work felt so high-level, as if he was an astronaut conducting experiments on the moon, until I discovered all of this research was happening down the street from my school at the Salk Institute. Stunned, I realized that it was quite possible to bring the famous scientists I was learning about in the classroom into my classroom.
Taking a leap of faith, I emailed Dr. Gage directly and while unfortunately he himself could not come to LJCDS, he redirected me to Dr. Krishna Vadodaria who agreed to come and talk about her research on neurogenesis at the Salk Institute. As a post-doctoral fellow in Dr. Gage’s lab, Dr. Vadodaria recently published her work describing a technology to create serotonergic neurons directly from human fibroblasts.”
