Kaitlyn Dorst, Ph.D.
I started research when I first accepted a high school internship in the Mammalian Respiratory Neurobiology lab led by Dr. Christopher Del Negro at William & Mary. I loved my experiences so much that I decided to stay in the lab when I matriculated as an undergraduate. I earned my BS in Biology with honors in 2017, and went to Boston University shortly after to pursue a PhD in Neuroscience. In Dr. Steve Ramirez’s lab I investigated how cell populations responsible for processing fear memories (i.e., fear memory engram ensembles) can alter behavioral strategies contingent on demands such as the external environment. Additionally, a branch of that project applied network analyses based in graph theory to identify brain-wide patterns of functional connectivity during fear memory engram manipulation. As a postdoctoral scholar in Dr. Jamie Maguire’s lab, I will leverage my skills in animal behavior to study how environmental experiences alter fear discrimination while learning other techniques to elucidate population dynamics within the basolateral amygdala that could shape behavioral outcomes.