Cowen Lab
Current Masters & Ph.D. Students
Abhilasha Vishwanath (PhD in Psychology)
Gianna Jordan (Masters in Biomedical Engineering)
I am a 2nd year master's student in the Biomedical Engineering program, where I also earned my BS. As an undergraduate student I worked in both pre-hospital and in-patient healthcare settings while also conducting research in the departments of Orthopedic Surgery and Public Health. Now, as a graduate student, I'm interested in applying engineering principles to solve problems faced in neuroscience. Specifically, how devices and software can be used or designed to yield more information from a study or reduce the human labor required for analysis. While in Dr. Cowen's lab I have been working on a system to quantify rat movements in a behavior for the study of motor disorders. In the future we hope to expand this system for the study of reward expectation and decision making.
Gabriel Holguin (PhD in Psychology)
My primary interests are in the neurobiological basis of learning and memory, and how these cognitive domains are altered in Parkinson's disease and other neurodegenerative disorders. As a graduate student in Dr. Stephen Cowen's lab, I will be exploring the therapeutic effects of ketamine to alleviate levodopa-induced dyskinesia in Parkinson's disease rats. We also aim to uncover biomarkers, such as broad-band gamma oscillations, underlying Parkinson’s disease dyskinesia after long-term levodopa use.
Updated: 02/16/23