(Re)search And You Shall Find - Kenna Nguyen
If you had asked my 15-year old high school self whether or not I was interested in doing research in college, I wouldn’t have even known that it was a possibility. As my second year at USC comes to a close, I can comfortably laugh at my 15-year old self because research, in fact, has become a key piece of my undergraduate experience.
At the beginning of my sophomore year, I joined a neuroscience laboratory in the Hedco Neuroscience Building right on the University Park Campus (USC’s main undergraduate campus). My research involves looking at the neural mechanisms and brain structures that are involved with hyperaggression to better understand several major diseases and disorders in humans such as schizophrenia, post traumatic stress disorder, and alcohol/drug misuse. In order to study this, we use rat brains from rats that have undergone a limited feeding schedule and then have been exposed to intruder rats during the behavioral part of this study. This exploits a rat’s natural territorial aggression. Using histology, neuroanatomy, microscopy, imaging, and analysis of the brains, we are able to better understand how and where hyperaggression is expressed in the brain.
Some of the highlights from my research experience this year are my involvement in BISC 490x, receiving various grants to fund my work, as well as participating in the Undergraduate Research Symposium. I will briefly explain what each of those are:
BISC 490x is student-proposed, faculty-supervised research that can be used to earn from two to four units of elective credit in a semester. The advantage of doing a 4-unit BISC-490x course is that I received 4 units of upper division elective credit for my major, Biological Sciences.
The SOAR (Student Opportunities for Academic Research) program provides funding to Dornsife undergraduates for participation as a research assistant in a faculty member’s project. I was able to receive $1,000 this academic year as a grant for the research project that I am a part of.
The Undergraduate Symposium for Scholarly and Creative Work provides undergraduates with the unique opportunity to exhibit and share examples of their significant research and creativity with the university community. This was a great opportunity to share the project that I have been working on throughout the year. I created a poster that I then presented to judges at the symposium!
