Makous Prize Recipients

2023

Kallam Danial Kara-Pabani

Kallam Danial Kara-Pabani: Kallam is a neuroscience major who just finished his junior year at the University of Rochester and has been working as a research assistant in the Majewska lab since his sophomore year. Kallam is particularly interested in how microglia in females and males differ and how these differences may lend insight into the pathology of sex-dependent neurodegenerative diseases. Sex differences are often understudied yet can contain pertinent findings that may eventually result in more sex-specific treatments.

As a recipient of the 2022 Schwartz Discover Grant, Kallam spent the summer investigating the sexual-dimorphism in the microglial response to inhibition of colony-stimulating factor 1 in adult mice. This work illustrated how male and female microglia utilize different survival pathways. Kallam presented this research at the 2023 Undergraduate Research Expo where he was awarded the Dean’s Award for the quality and communication of his research. Kallam has now taken a role as a research ambassador in the Office of Undergraduate Research in order to mentor those starting out in research.

Kallam is extremely grateful to receive the Walt and Bobbi Makous Prize and would like to thank Dr. Ania Majewska and all the members of the Majewska lab for making his research experiences possible. Specifically, Kallam would like to thank Linh Le who has mentored him throughout the research process.

Kendall Kohout

Kendall Kohout: Kendall is a biomedical engineering major who recently completed her junior year at the University of Rochester and has been working as an undergraduate research assistant in the Williams lab for three years. Her work has primarily focused on using adaptive optics to anatomically classify retinal ganglion cells. This approach connects the gold standard feature of classifying retinal ganglion cells – anatomy – with the robust adaptive optics in vivo calcium imaging technique. Kendall shared her work at the 2022 Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology annual conference as a poster presentation. Kendall is particularly interested in using adaptive optics to study the visual pathway and influence the methods employed to diagnose and treat ocular diseases.

Kendall is exceptionally honored to receive the Walt and Bobbi Makous Prize this year. She would like to thank Dr. David Williams, Dr. Sara Patterson, and Dr. Tyler Godat for their mentorship and guidance as well as all members of the Advanced Retinal Imaging Alliance team for their support. Kendall is truly looking forward to continuing her work in the Williams lab for her senior year as well as all of the vision science that is sure to be part of her future endeavors.

Glory Linebach

Glory Linebach: Glory is a double major in Optical Engineering and Dance Studies who has been working in the Active Perception (AP) Lab as an undergraduate researcher since the fall of 2021. Working closely with optics graduate student Benjamin Moon, Glory has developed custom data analysis code for processing high-resolution images and videos of the human retina that were captured with the adaptive optics system in the AP Lab. She is currently working on the assembly and alignment of an optical relay system that will add new stimulus-delivery capabilities to the retinal imaging system.

Glory is deeply grateful to receive a Makous Prize award and would like to thank Professor Jannick Rolland and Professor Martina Poletti for their nomination and mentorship, as well as Benjamin Moon and all members of the AP Lab team for their everyday support in the lab. Glory plans to take the valuable skills she has learned in the lab into graduate school and beyond.


2022

Draco(Yunlong) Xu

Draco(Yunlong) Xu: Draco(Yunlong) Xu is a double major in Computer Science and Mathematics, both in honors programs. He is interested in using computational models to understand visual decision-making. Draco has been involved in the Tadin Lab since the Fall of 2021. Prior to that, he started working with Prof. Ruyuan Zhang who is an alumnus of Tadin Lab. In the field of vision science, he has worked on four projects. (1) Temporal Evolution of Motion Direction Judgments: He is using deep neural networks and spiking neural networks for understanding the motion axis extraction in motion direction judgments. (2) Life-span Model for Perceptual Decision Making: It investigates perceptual decision-making using different methods (reaction time and duration thresholds) under different levels of perceptual noise to understand the development and decline of perceptual decision-making across the lifespan. (3) Social Effects of Crowd Gaze on Visual Search: He is helping with investigating whether and when gaze facilitates visual search, and whether individuals with a higher number of autistic traits are less efficient at using crowd gaze cues. (4) Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Visual Decision-making and Confidence: He is building computational models based on behavioral data and FMRI data.

Draco is broadly interested in computational methods in many different fields. He is also working with Professor Vankee Lin at Stanford University on aging and stress based on monochromatic fluorescence imaging data. Besides, he has been serving as a research assistant in the Department of Computer Science and his work on dynamic network construction has already been published in SIGMOD 2022. He had a remarkable academic career and has been on the Dean's list every single semester. He also enjoyed teaching and served as a teaching assistant for various courses in Computer Science.

Draco's dream is to unravel the mystery of the human mind and intelligence. Not only is he interested in the circuits and patterns of neural activity that generate mental processes and behavior, but he also wants to help cure neurodegenerative diseases and build artificial general intelligence. In the future, he wants to explore essential and challenging problems like the general mathematical models of perceiving, reasoning and learning, how intelligence emerges from a complicated structure, and how agents interact with each other in producing and discovering interwoven concepts and knowledge.

Draco is extremely grateful to receive the Walt and Bobbi Makous Prize. He feels grateful for all the support and mentorship from Professor Duje Tadin and Professor Ruyuan Zhang, making pursuing his passion for science possible. He also wants to thank his collaborator Ying, Penny, and all the members from the Tadin lab for doing fascinating research together.

Zhengyang Xu

Zhengyang Xu: Zhengyang is an Optics major who has been working in the McGregor Lab, and he has been working as an undergraduate researcher in the ARIA team since his sophomore year. Zhengyang’s project with Prof. McGregor aims to understand the physiological changes in retinal ganglion cells after losing photoreceptor inputs. Understanding these changes with adaptive optics in vivo imaging in primate fovea is crucial to building a fundamental understanding for future vision restoration therapy. Currently, he is working on a high-speed adaptive optics control system that aims to fully compensate primate retinal motions to acquire a better signal-to-noise ratio for retinal ganglion cell calcium recordings. This May, Zhengyang will be traveling to Denver to present his research at the association for research in vision and ophthalmology annual meeting, ARVO 2022.

Zhengyang is grateful to receive this award and would like to thank Dr. McGregor and all members of the ARIA team for their support. Starting next September, Zhengyang will continue his research in the McGregor Lab for his Optics Ph.D.


2021

Ankita Kumar

Ankita Kumar: Ankita is a Neuroscience major who has been working as an undergraduate research assistant in the Huxlin lab during her junior year. She is interested in studying the role of metabolic plasticity in corneal fibrosis, which has been shown to negatively impact nerve regrowth during corneal healing post-injury. Her projects have included studying changes in mitochondrial morphology in corneal fibrosis and examining changes of profibrotic markers during de-differentiation of myofibroblasts after pharmacological manipulation.

As 2021's recipient of the de Kiewiet Summer Research Fellowship, Ankita will dedicate her summer studying metabolic changes necessary for myofibroblast de-differentiation via the inhibition of the mitochondrial pyruvate carrier. As part of this fellowship, she will present her work at the annual poster session during Meliora Weekend. She plans to continue her research in the Huxlin lab as part of her Senior Honors Thesis.

Ankita hopes to continue her research interests in medicine by pursing an MD/PhD. She is incredibly honored to receive the Walt and Bobbi Makous Prize, and would like to thank Dr. Huxlin, Dr. Nehrke, and Dr. Jeon for their tremendous guidance and support.

Martynas Snarskis

Martynas Snarskis: Martynas is a graduating Brain and Cognitive Science major and Take 5 Scholar studying Foundations of Mathematics. He has been conducting research with Haefner Lab since his Junior year. Marty spent the previous two summers, funded by the Discover Grant, attempting to design an experiment to allow us to estimate how approximate human decision-making is -- culminating in his Honor's Thesis. He has also studied how biases in confidence judgements are modulated by higher-order stimulus statistics, presented at the Undergraduate Research Expo, and how temporal biases in evidence integration are related to confidence biases, accepted into the CogSci Conference proceedings. He also briefly worked on neurosurgical robotics and machine learning at Duke University in the summer of 2018, and computational linguistics with Dr. Aaron White. He is broadly interested in computational methods in cognitive science and bridging the science and philosophy of mind. Marty will spend this summer at Haefner Lab funded by the Meliora Fellowship, and hopes to continue trans-disciplinary research, focusing on how disparate fields can constrain and inform each other to enable a more holistic understanding of human experience and behavior. He will also push to make academic communities healthier, more inclusive, and equitable.

Marty is honored to receive the Walt and Bobbi Makous Prize. He would like to thank Dr. Ralf Haefner, Sabyachi Shivkumar, and Ankani Chattoraj for being excellent mentors and friends; as well as Dr. Aaron White, Dr. Patrick Codd, and Dr. Matt Tucker for providing mentorship and experience in fascinating fields beyond vision science.


2020

Dane Johnson

Dane Johnson: Dane is a double major in Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Computer Science. He is interested in using virtual reality to find new ways to study vision and sensory processing. He has been a research assistant in Tadin Lab since his sophomore year when he joined to work on a virtual reality brain-training study. After assisting with this study for a year, Dane was awarded a summer research fellowship by the Center for Visual Science which allowed him to start a new project. Dane developed a virtual reality task that measures visual-proprioceptive integration in subjects by tracking their hand motions while displaying visual stimuli in a 3D virtual environment. The use of virtual reality for this experiment was a great step forward as it allowed the lab to bypass the use of expensive robotics that had previously been required for this area of research. Dane continued to develop this experiment, resulting in a study that has been run on over a dozen subjects to examine sensory processing differences in kids with autism spectrum disorder.

Dane is honored to receive this award and would like to thank Dr. Duje Tadin and the members of his lab for their support. He is looking forward to another year of research in Tadin Lab and finding new ways to utilize virtual reality to study vision.

Evelyn Matei

Evelyn Matei: Evelyn is a neuroscience and chemistry double major who recently finished her junior year at the University of Rochester and has been working as a research assistant in the Majewska lab since her sophomore year. She is interested in learning about microglial cell development and regulation in the healthy brain, since most work on microglia thus far has focused on their response in the diseased brain. Her primary projects include studying the role of the lipid kinase PI3Kγ in regulating microglial function in the visual cortex.

As a recipient of the 2019 Bilski-Mayer Summer Research Fellowship, Evelyn spent her summer studying the role of PI3Kg in the development of microglial characteristics such as density, distribution, and morphology. This research was presented at the 2019 CVS Summer Program in Vision Science poster session, the 2019 Biology Department Poster Session, and the 2020 Undergraduate Research Expo. She is also a recipient of the 2020 Summer Fellowship in Vision Science.

Evelyn is extremely grateful to receive the Walt and Bobbi Makous Prize, and would like to thank Dr. Majewska and all the members from the Majewska lab for making her research experiences possible. She hopes to continue working in the Majewska lab until she graduates in 2021.

Yongsoo Ra

Yongsoo Ra: Yongsoo is a Neuroscience and Computer Science double major. He is interested in circuits and connections among functionally distinct populations of neurons that contribute to visual perception and decision making. Yongsoo has been working as an undergraduate researcher in the DeAngelis lab, studying how sensory and motor signals integrate in the dorsal medial superior temporal (MSTd) area. Additionally, he has been working in the Haefner lab, devising a model that describes how humans direct their attention given evidence in favor or against their current belief. Yongsoo presented his work at the University of Rochester as a Dekiewiet and Bilski-Mayer fellowship recipient. Additionally, his abstracts on his work with Greg DeAngelis and Ralf Haefner were accepted at the Vision Science Society in 2020. With such experiences, Yongsoo has been awarded with a Cosyne Undergraduate Travel Award in 2020.

Yongsoo is planning to pursue a graduate education to further his horizons in neuroscience research. Not only does he feel honored to have received the award, but he also feels grateful for all the support and resources from Greg DeAngelis and Ralf Haefner, as well as all the other members of the labs.


2019

Jason Atlas

Jason Atlas: Jason is a Neuroscience and Psychology double major. He is interested in studying microglial contributions to synaptic plasticity and learning, particularly with regards to treating neurodegenerative processes and mental disorders. Jason has been working as a Research Assistant in the Majewska lab since his junior year. Currently, he is investigating microglial self-renewal in the visual and somatosensory cortices of the adult brain. While the establishment of these cells during embryonic development is thoroughly documented in the literature, this distinct process of self-renewal in adulthood is still not entirely understood. Previously, Jason has studied this phenomenon through a genetic approach of microglial depletion. However, this past year he utilized pharmacological methods in order to further examine this process of self-renewal and the implications it has on both microglia and astrocytes.

Jason has presented his work at the Neuroscience Retreat for the past two years. This past spring, his project explored changes in microglial morphology and dynamics as these cells repopulate the brain in early adulthood. This October, Jason will be traveling to Chicago to present his research at the Society for Neuroscience's (SfN) 49th annual meeting, Neuroscience 2019.

Although Jason plans on attending medical school, he intends to continue contributing to neuroscience research through collaborative efforts once he is established. Jason is incredibly grateful to be receiving the Makous Prize. He would like to thank Dr. Majewska, his mentors, and the rest of the Majewska lab for their guidance and support, as well as making his time in the lab so memorable.

Erin Tepesch

Erin Tepesch: Erin just graduated with a major in Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and she began working as a research assistant for Duje Tadin in the University of Rochester's Vision and Cognitive Neuroscience during her junior year. She was able to continue working in the lab throughout the summer leading up to her senior year thanks to the Center for Visual Science's Summer Fellowship program. During this Fellowship, she helped begin a project exploring brain training using virtual reality. Thanks to the help of peers in the Fellowship who kindly volunteered as subjects, she was able to complete the piloting process to get the new study running throughout the following school year.

Erin is tremendously grateful to have received this award, and she thanks Duje Tadin for his generous support, as well as the other members of the lab that made the entire experience a highlight of her time as an undergraduate.


2018

Hanna Batchelor

Hanna Batchelor: Hanna is a neuroscience major who recently finished her third year at the University of Rochester. She is interested in learning about synaptic plasticity and its implications on central nervous system functioning. Hanna has been working as a Research Assistant in the Majewksa lab since her sophomore year and is currently working on a project investigating the role of beta-adrenergic signaling on the role of microglia in synaptic plasticity. She is attending the University of Rochester thanks to the Bausch and Lomb Honorary Science Award for her achievement in science and academics.

In the summer of 2017, as a recipient of the Bilski-Mayer Summer Research Fellowship and Discover Grant from the University of Rochester, Hanna's project involved comparing the distribution and morphology of cerebellar microglia to the well-studied cortical microglia in the visual cortex. As a result of this project, she was published as a third author in Developmental Neurobiology. She hopes to continue her research in the Majewska lab until she graduates from the University of Rochester in 2019.

Hanna is extremely honored to receive the Walt and Bobbi Makous Prize and would like to thank Dr. Ania Majewska and everyone in the Majewska Lab for making her research experiences possible.

Shuyi Chen

Shuyi Chen: Shuyi (Penny) is a Brain and Cognitive Science major with computer science and vision science minors. She is interested in studying visual and motion perception differences among different populations and their neural correlates. She has been an undergraduate research assistant in Tadin Lab since her freshmen year's summer and worked on three projects. (1) the effects of crowd gaze cues on visual search behavior—the work she presented at the 2018 UR Undergraduate Research Expo (Chen et al., 2018), (2) mechanisms underlying beneficial effects of brain stimulation on visual processing (Melnick et al., 2018, VSS abstracts), and (3) sex differences in visual perception (Chen et al., 2019). I addition, she has been also working in Vankee Lin's lab and, more recently in Michele Rucci's group.

As 2018's recipient of Bilski-Mayer Summer Research Fellowship at the University of Rochester, Penny continues on one her projects in Tadin, Lin and Rucci labs. Penny was also awarded 2019 Catherine Block Memorial Fund Prize (university wide award for a women scientist in the junior class), 2019 Summer Fellowship Program in Vision Science and 2018 Bilski-Mayer Summer Research Fellowship (for students studying brain science). Penny is honored to receive Makous Prize, and she would like to thank all the members from Dr. Duje Tadin's lab for their guidance and support.


2017

Reva Peer

Reva Peer: Reva is a Molecular Genetics Major with a minor in Psychology as a Social Science. She is interested in studying how plasticity and learning can be affected in the developing and adult brain. She has been a Research Assistant in the Majewska Lab since her Sophomore year, and has been working on a project studying the impact of the neurotoxin 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin on microglia morphology in the brain. She has conducted research on the impact of this neurotoxin in adolescent mice and is currently studying the impact of this neurotoxin in adult mice. She plans to continue her research as part of a Senior Honors Thesis.

Reva has been involved in research since her junior year of high school, where she participated in several research opportunities. This research was conducted in a variety of fields such as chemistry and reproductive medicine at research facilities in the University of California, Davis, the Western Human Nutrition Research Center and the Cleveland Clinic. Reva has been working in the Majewska Lab during the school year and this past summer as a University of Rochester Summer Scholar.

Starting in June, Reva will continue working in the Majewska Lab as a DeKewitt Summer Fellow. Reva is looking forward to expanding her work on her project and hopefully seeing it to completion and eventual publication. Reva is extremely thankful to receive such a prestigious award. She is honored to receive the Makous Prize and be able to continue pursuing her passion for research.

JT Pirog

JT Pirog: JT is an Optics major with minors in math and music. He is interested in using optics to study human visual processes. Currently, as a research assistant in Yoon Physiological Optics Lab with Dr. Yoon and Dr. Antoine Barbot, he is working on characterizing neural adaptation in keratoconus patients. Keratocnous is a disease that distorts the corneal surface leading to highly blurred vision that cannot be corrected with traditional lenses and contacts. His work has focused on identifying adaptation to spatial phase modulations caused by the disease which will contribute to the development of re-adapation training and exercises that aim to improve the visual quality of these patients. As a result of this research, he has written his senior thesis for his BS in optics and presented his findings as the first author in a paper presentation at the 2017 ARVO conference.

JT has been involved in Yoon Lab since the fall of 2016. Prior to that he worked at the L V Prasad Eye Institute in Hyderabad, India where he was first exposed to vision science research. There he began developing a visual acuity testing paradigm for non verbal patients, assisted in a study that assessed performance of low vision patients in visual search tasks, and consulted in the development of The Pediatric Perimeter—a device used to measure visual field in infants.

This summer JT will complete his project in Yoon Lab as a Xerox fellowship recipient. He hopes to pursue a PhD in optics or vision science following graduation. JT would like to acknowledge Dr. Yoon and Dr. Barbot, for their consistent support, guidance and rapport during his time at Yoon Lab.


2016

Emily Prentiss

Emily Prentiss: Emily is a Brain and Cognitive Sciences Major with a minor in Clinical Psychology. She is interested in studying how sensory information informs everyday activities. Currently, as a Research Assistant in the Concept, Actions, and Objects (CAOs) Lab with Dr. Brad Mahon, she is working on a project studying the role of different visual pathways using behavioral measures. She is conducting this experiment in healthy individuals and in patients who have suffered phenomenal vision loss as the result of a stroke (blindsight). As a result of this research, she completed an honors thesis, "The Role of the Parvocellular System in Fast Visuomotor Updating."

Emily has been involved in research at the University of Rochester since her Sophomore year. Prior to working in the CAOs Lab, she was a research assistant for Professor David Knill in the Center for Visual Science from 2013 to 2014, assisting with data collection for a variety of behavioral experiments focusing on visual working memory and motor planning.

Beginning in June, Emily will be joining the CAOs lab as a full-time research assistant. She is excited to expand on current projects, explore new research techniques, and develop her research interests. In the future, she hopes to pursue a PhD in cognitive neuroscience. Emily is honored to receive the Makous Prize, and is very thankful that she gets to further her research experience at Rochester!


2015

Zoe Pruitt

Zoe Pruitt: Zoe's research investigates how we learn to attend. Specifically, she is interested in how we develop category knowledge and use this knowledge to guide our attention. In one study, she showed that people who diet more have stronger representations of healthy vs unhealthy food (because dieting necessitates strict boundaries). Moreover, consistent dieters activate these category representations by 200ms even when the categories are irrelevant, such as when searching for a specific food item. In another study, she showed that we can use feature regularities, such as correlation, to bind features into novel objects and objects into novel categories, and use these unitized novel object and category representations by 200ms. Both of these studies have resulted in two manuscripts under review in high-ranking academic journals, and two conference presentations. She is now interested in investigating how this ability develops from childhood and how it potentially declines in aging adults.

Broadly speaking, "learning to attend" is related to "learning to see", an interesting skill often developed when learning fine art. Zoe merges her major in Studio Art with her major in Brain and Cognitive Science and her minor in Psychology to better understand the underlying mechanisms involved in finding relevant information. During her junior year, she studied graphic design at the Danish School for Study Abroad to better understand how visual designers purposefully direct the viewer's gaze.

Zoe has been recognized on the Dean's List every semester of her college career and receives multiple merit-based scholarships. Beyond academics, she dances in the Sihir Belly Dance Ensemble- performing in biannual shows, choreographing, and designing posters. She is also a purple belt and trains with the University's Tae Kwon Do club.

Zoe is honored to receive the Makous Prize and extends thanks to the Center for Visual Science for making the award available. She is also grateful for her supervisor, Dr. Rachel Wu, whose guidance makes Zoe's research possible.

Jenny Won

Jungeun (Jenny) Won: Jenny is a biomedical engineering major with a minor in optics. She is interested in interfacing technologies with medicine and contributing to the improvement of human health using light. She has been deeply intrigued by the development of high-resolution imaging techniques that would extend the range of early diagnosis and primary care. Since her sophomore year, she joined Dr. Jannick Rolland's lab at the Institute of Optics, and started several optical diagnostic projects that employed Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT). The projects include skin cancer diagnosis, optimization of Gabor-Domain Optical Coherence Microscope (GD-OCM) system, and corneal imaging.

During the summer of 2014, Jenny had a prestigious opportunity to completely immerse herself in research as a Xerox Engineering Fellow. In addition, she was also a part of the Center for Visual Science undergraduate summer research program, where she learned recent researches in neuroscience, cognitive science, and biomedical optics from faculty members. Her research explores the effect of edge-thickness of soft contact lens in comfort by providing precise measurement of the edge-thickness using GD-OCM. She has developed an automated algorithm that accurately computes the edge-thickness of contact lens and displays the thickness profile. During her senior year, she was chosen to present a poster on her research at Frontiers in Optics (FiO) in Tucson, AZ, and the annual meeting of Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES) in San Antonio, TX. Currently, she prospects to submit her first co-authored publication that elaborates her findings.

Jenny has had a strong academic career, and also served as a tutor and teaching assistant for various courses at the biomedical engineering department. She is looking forward to continuing her research career and achieving her next goal. In the fall, she will enroll in University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) for bioengineering PhD program. Upon completion of the degree, she would like to look into academia.


2014

Brittany Hopkins

Brittany Hopkins: Brittany's research explores animal models that are used to study the behavior of microglia which are the brain's immune cells. Microglia have recently been shown to be very dynamic in the brain in the absence of an immune challenge and may contribute to non-immune brain processes such as learning and memory. To explore this dynamic role microglia need to be labeled with a fluorescent protein that can be imaged in the intact brain. While it is largely assumed that these fluorescent microglia behave like normal microglia, few studies have tried to assess this. Brittany has shown that fluorescent microglia in two different transgenic lines of mice are very similar to normal microglia. This allows the imaging of the microglia in these mice to further understand new and exciting roles that microglia may play in the brain.

Brittany is a neuroscience major with a minor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Brittany has had a strong academic career, she is on the Dean's List and has received a Dean's scholarship for her studies. Brittany also has many interests outside of academics and has been heavily involved in Campus Activities Board (CAB), which is responsible for planning campus wide events, like the community weekends and comedians, for the River Campus. She also gives back to the university community as a teaching assistant.

Brittany now adds another honor to her list of accomplishments. She has been awarded the Walt and Bobbi Makous undergraduate research prize for her unwavering commitment to scientific research. Since her junior year, Brittany has worked in the department of Neurobiology and Anatomy on an independent research project in the lab of Dr. Ania Majewska. She was also awarded the prestigious Center for Visual Science undergraduate summer research fellowship to continue her work full-time during the summer. During her senior year she wrote and successfully defended a Senior Thesis to earn a Distinction in Research on her degree. She was also chosen to present a poster on her research at the National Conference on Undergraduate Research this spring. During the last few years Brittany has worked on characterizing two transgenic mouse lines that label microglia, the CX3CR1-GFP line and the YA line. The Majewska lab, along with many other labs that study microglia in the brain, utilizes these transgenic lines for in vivo imaging studies. Thus, Brittany's project was critical in determining if the microglia in these transgenic lines mimic wild-type microglial behavior. She showed that both of the transgenic lines have an unchanged microglial density in primary visual cortex. She used microglial morphology as a way to assess microglial behavior in fixed tissue and found that both lines had some morphological deviation from normal morphology but that these changes were small in magnitude. She was also able to characterize how well the fluorescent genetic label represents microglia. Overall she was able to show that both of the transgenic lines are great tools for fluorescently labeling microglia and are extremely useful for in vivo imaging, although for different purposes. For her study, Brittany has to master numerous scientific techniques, including immunohistochemistry, confocal and epifluorescent imaging and fluorescent analysis. Her work culminated in a first-author manuscript that is current being prepared for publication. Brittany is looking forward to her next challenge. In the fall she will enroll in the Northwestern University's Interdepartmental Neuroscience PhD program.

Andrew Bui

Andrew Bui: Andrew is a neuroscience major and just finished his third year at the University of Rochester. Andrew is heavily involved in the university and this is seen through his extracurricular activities. He is Co-President of the Brain and Cognitive Science and Neuroscience Undergraduate Council, as well as a study group leader for organic chemistry I and II through the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and an organic chemistry laboratory teaching assistant. He is also a McNair Scholar and was accepted into the Ronald E. McNair Achievement Program in the summer of 2013. Outside the university, he also finds the time to give back to the community whenever he can. He volunteered as a tutor through the Upward Bound Program, helping low-income students who are enrolled in the Rochester City School District become the first members of their families to attend college as well as volunteered at Strong Memorial Hospital in the Emergency Department. To share his joy for neuroscience, he also volunteered in the Brain Awareness Campaign where he traveled to local elementary schools to teach students about the brain through fun and interactive games and activities during the month of March.

Andrew now adds another honor to his list of accomplishments. He has been awarded the Walt and Bobbi Makous undergraduate research prize for his unwavering commitment to scientific research. Since his first year he has been working in the department of Ophthalmology in the lab of Dr. Lin Gan. In December 2013, he was published as a second author for his work in the expression of LIM-homeodomain transcription factors in the developing and mature mouse retina. His research centered on the expression of LHX9. Little is known about the expression of LHX9, other than a brief report of it being expressed in the inner nuclear layer of the developing Xenopus retina. Using in-situ hybridization and immunohistochemistry, he demonstrated that LHX9 is expressed exclusively in a subset of amacrine cells. This was a remarkable discovery since the expression of LHX9 in the mammalian retina has not been further characterized until now. Andrew is looking forward to his final year at the University of Rochester and hopefully will have one more publication under his belt before he graduates.


2013

William Spencer Klubben

William Spencer Klubben III: The second Walt and Bobbi Makous Prize has been awarded to: W. Spencer Klubben, a Biomedical Engineering senior working in Ania Majewska's laboratory. As a biomedical engineer, Spencer concentrated in medical optics and developed a strong interest in visual perception and development. Spencer's work has primarily focused on quantifying microglia's affect on neuroplasticity within the visual cortex and visual system. Most experimental methods have been focused around the utilization of optical imaging to analyze neuronal activity within mice cortex. Experiments were conducted on mice with a varying dosage of CX3CR1, a single allele genetic fractalkine receptor responsible for the mobility of microglia. Spencer received the Makous Prize at a College-wide award ceremony on Saturday, May 19, 2013.


2012

James Eles

James Eles: The first-ever Walt and Bobbi Makous Prize for Excellence in Undergraduate Vision Research was presented to James Eles during the senior awards ceremony during commencement weekend.

James Eles is a neuroscience major currently in his fifth-year in the Take-5 program where he is studying the history and psychology of warrior codes. James has had a remarkable academic career and has been on the Dean's list every single semester. He has received a Dean's scholarship for his studies and has been elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Since his junior year he has worked in the department of Neurobiology and Anatomy on an independent research project in the lab of Dr. Ania Majewska. He was also awarded the prestigious Center for Visual Science undergraduate summer research fellowship to continue his work full-time during the summer. During the last few years James worked on a glutamate transporter, GLT-1, which is expressed exclusively in glial cells in the mouse cerebral cortex. He showed that GLT-1 expression can be modulated by sensory experience. This was an unexpected finding since glia are largely expected to play supportive roles to neurons and not necessarily participate in responses driven by changes in the sensory environment.

His finding is novel and exciting as it suggests instead that glial cells can respond to sensory activity by altering glutamate processing which can in turn affect the function of neurons. For his study, James has to master numerous scientific techniques, including immunocytochemistry, imaging, fluorescent and electron microscopy analysis. His work culminated in a first-author manuscript that is currently submitted for publication. James is looking forward to his next challenge. In the fall he will enroll in the Biomedical Engineering Graduate Program at the University of Pittsburgh.