Kristen Brown's picture

Kristen
Brown

  • Northeastern University ( May-2018 )
  • Woodcliff Lake, New Jersey, USA

About (Summary)

Hello! My name is Kristen Brown, and I am a junior at Northeastern University. I’m a behavioral neuroscience major and history minor originally from northern New Jersey. Though I have many interests, I have directed most of my attention to neuroscience. In particular, I have worked in a neurobiology lab as a research assistant full time for two six-month "co-ops," where I used advanced imaging techniques to record the activity of cortical neurons in mice as they performed a sensorimotor integration task. Our lab studies neural circuits, so the data I contributed will provide valuable information about individual cells that can then be used to understand the system as a whole. While in college, I have also had the opportunity to attend the Society for Neuroscience meeting in 2015 and 2016. This annual conference draws about 30,000 neuroscience researchers and students from around the world. I was very lucky to attend as an undergraduate. You may have noticed that I'm also pursuing a history minor. I have always been interested in history, and learning about the Cold War in a high school IB history class inspired me to take related classes at Northeastern. I've taken courses about Soviet espionage during the Cold War, as well as Russian history and culture before 1914. To learn about another major player in 20th century history, I spent the spring 2016 semester at the Free University in Berlin taking classes about modern German history, totalitarianism, Berlin history and literature, and the German language. This experience combined my academic interests with my lifelong desire to travel. Next summer, I will be going on two separate mini-study abroad trips through Northeastern's Dialogue of Civilizations program. For the first trip, in May, I will travel to Santiago, Chile to take a Biomedical Imaging course with a Northeastern professor as well as a Chilean culture course taught by multiple professors from the Universidad de los Andes. I will learn how medical imaging techniques like MRI and ultrasound work, while immersing myself in a different culture and hopefully picking up some Spanish. I was inspired to take this class because I enjoyed doing imaging in the lab on co-op and because I will probably use some of these techniques in my future career. The second trip is a five-week-long journey across Russia, where I will learn about Russian culture and language as we travel from west to east. I decided to sign up for this program because I was so amazed by what I learned in one of the history classes I mentioned earlier. I hope to better understand this country, one we hear so much about in the news, by seeing it firsthand.

Education

Your Major

behavioral neuroscience

Language Proficiency

Honors and Awards

Grad School Interests

I aim to earn a combined MD/PhD degree and become a physician-scientist. My ultimate goal is to connect basic neuroscience research with its clinical application, bridging the gap that exists between cellular-level knowledge and the observable behavioral effects of neurological disease. I believe I will be able to accomplish this by gaining a comprehensive understanding of the human body in an allopathic medical school, and by making patient care a component of my career as a physician-scientist. A medical professional degree will allow me to take insight from these clinical interactions into the lab in order to ask the most relevant questions; then, the new knowledge may be integrated back into the clinical practice. Ultimately, pursuing both medical and research training will best prepare me for a career through which I can advance medicine.

Intended Job Path

I intend to conduct translational neuroscience research as a physician-scientist in an academic institution and treat patients.

Job Experience

Volunteering

Hobbies

reading, traveling, baking, exploring Boston

Organizations

Kristen Brown - Northeastern University | HonorSociety.org
View Kristen Brown's profile on HonorSociety.org. HonorSociety.org is the preeminent organization dedicated to recognition of student success, and to empower students to achieve.