Outstanding Graduate Student Mentor Award

Congratulations to Ariana Stickel, who was just given the Outstanding Graduate Student Mentor award by UBRP - Undergraduate Biology Research Program.
Ariana is a PhD Student in the Clinical Psychology Program. Ariana’s research investigates the relationships between body fat and brain structure in older adults.  She is particularly interested in changes in white matter that may result from increased adiposity. Diffusion weighted imaging and voxel-based morphometry methods are being combined to study these processes.  Further, the effects of these relationships on cognition will be studied using neuropsychological measures of executive functions, memory, and processing speed.  Also important to these investigations are interactions of genes (e.g., the fat mass and obesity gene) and other physiological measurements (e.g., hypertension).