Caroline Clark

Caroline graduated with honors from Davidson College in 2024 with a B.S. in Psychology and concentration in Neuroscience. She first became interested in the biological basis of learning and memory during her summer internship in the clinical neuroscience lab of Dr. Mario Jorge Andreau at Universidad del Salvador in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Caroline then conducted independent research under Dr. Mark Smith, studying substance use disorder in the rodent model. After being awarded an Abernethy Grant from Davidson College, she conducted her undergraduate senor thesis in Dr. Kristi Multhaup’s Cognitive Psychology lab investigating hyper-binding, an age-related memory phenomenon. 

After Caroline graduated, she spent two years as a post-bac fellow in the Neural Engineering lab of Dr. Da-Ting Lin at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Caroline employed viral tract tracing, DREADDs, and in-vivo calcium imaging using miniscopes to characterize dopamine receptor-expressing medium spiny neuron (MSN) activity in the rat nucleus accumbens (NAc). She also completed an independent research project piloting dual-channel miniscopes to simultaneously record calcium and extracellular dopamine dynamics in the NAc of freely moving rats. 

Caroline is now an NIH Oxford Scholar who will delve further into the biological mechanisms underlying memory. She hopes to better characterize the role of Myosin-19, a specialized actin-based motor, in mitochondrial transport within hippocampal neurons.