Student Profiles

Gabi’s research experience started in a chemical ecology lab with Dr. Susan Whitehead, whose research focused on the evolutionary ecology of plant-animal interactions. She was awarded an undergraduate research grant to fund an independent study using statistical models to test how habitat fragmentation affects ant community composition over time. This work sparked her interest in computational research practices, which supported a transition from environmental sciences to neuro-genetics. As a junior, she was selected for a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) in Dr. Noah Snyder’s behavioral genomics lab. She developed a project under the single-cell molecular atlasing initiatives for the rhesus macaque brain to study the cellular heterogeneity of schizophrenia-associated brain regions, including the nucleus accumbens, temporal lobe, thalamus, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex. This allowed her to gain experiences and skills in transcriptomic neuroscience research. Before graduating, she also worked with a team of eight students to develop a machine organ perfusion preservation system for their senior design project. This system functioned to keep heart tissue viable for transplant by continuously pumping during transportation. She graduated from Virginia Tech with a B.S. in biological systems engineering, gaining wide exposure to environmental, genetic, and biomedical research.

In pursuit of continuing with neuro-genetics, after graduating, she joined the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), working in Dr. Francis McMahon’s lab in the Human Genetics Branch. There, she led a project studying the transcriptomic impacts of nine copy number variants (CNVs), which are among the greatest known genetic risk factors for several neuropsychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders. She hopes to apply these skills in transcriptomics and in the study of rare high-risk variants to the field of neuroimaging. During her time as an NIH-Oxford scholar, she aims to create a multi-modal project classifying the impacts of genetic variants to better understand the biological underpinnings of their risk for neuropsychiatric conditions.