University of Chicago, Clinical Neuroscience and Psychopharmocology Research Unit, Chicago, IL
This summer, I was fortunate enough to work in the Clinical Neuroscience and Psychopharmocology Research Unit at the University of Chicago under Dr. Royce Lee. I was unsure of exactly what to expect and how much responsibility I would be given as an undergraduate extern, but over the course of my eight weeks, I became immersed in the entire research process from coming up with a research question to running subjects to analyzing EEG data. The two main projects I worked on included Dr. Lee’s Theta EEG study on subjects with Borderline Personality Disorder and a collaborative pilot study with Dr. Dario Maestripieri, an evolutionary psychologist at the University, examining the relationship college students have to power and narcissism.
The CNPRU’s Theta EEG study is a years-long project that looks at how the brain reacts to different emotional faces, and whether or not the response differs for people with Borderline Personality Disorder or Intermittent Explosive Disorder compared to healthy controls. My job was to first learn the very basics of how to read and interpret an EEG to understand exactly what we were looking for. From there, I backtracked a little bit and learned how to cold-call potential subjects and conduct a “phone screen” to see if they were eligible for a lab visit, how to conduct a lab visit including informed consent, administering questionnaires, conducting the Rubber Hand Illusion, and finally setting up and administering the EEG. What I found most interesting was conducting phone screens and performing the Rubber Hand Illusion, a phenomenon that we use to test peoples’ association and dissociation with their bodies. Dr. Lee is looking to publish a paper this fall, and I am excited to stay in touch to work on it with him.
My largest role this summer was creating and running a pilot study examining the correlation between mental illnesses, power, relationships, and academic performance in college students. Drs. Lee and Maestripieri are coming together to investigate narcissism, power, and suicidality in college students, specifically at the University of Chicago. My job was to work with a team of graduate and undergraduate students (five of us in total) to fully create the lab study, recruit and schedule subjects, and then run each subject in an hour-long visit. We read previous literature regarding our topic, including one paper of which Professor Stroud of Williams was a primary author—which made me so excited, as I am taking my first class with Professor Stroud this fall! We then gathered surveys from our subjects that they took prior to their visit in the lab (these included questions about depression, anxiety, power, relationships, dominance, academic performance, and a few other topics), and then came up with the tasks we would conduct in the lab. We settled on a working memory task, a written task to code for how subjects perceive power, a Trier Stress Task, and also collected saliva samples along the way. I then was charged with managing the calendar, making sure subjects were scheduled, and corresponded via email with all subjects. I will continue my work on this project into the fall, and I’m very excited to see what we find!
The main takeaway from my work with Dr. Lee came from my opportunities to shadow him in his personality disorders clinic. Thursday mornings I was able to sit in with him and his residents and meet some of the patients he sees on a monthly basis. Dr. Lee is a psychiatrist, so a lot of the meetings were check-ins about certain medications and just basic checkups. However, what I found most rewarding was witnessing the bravery of these people who allowed me to sit in and listen to them be vulnerable.
This experience completely solidified my interest in working directly with people on a day-to-day basis—I felt immediately fulfilled. However, I also learned about myself that I want to be involved in the therapy side of things, not the medicine side of things. While I loved the work Dr. Lee was doing, I was left feeling like I wanted to get involved more as a therapist and have more time to really build relationships with patients, not just seeing them once a month in a clinic. This translates to Williams really well, because a lot of Williams professors stress the importance of social relationships and communication, which are not “textbook” topics, but incredibly important nonetheless. In the coming two years, I will definitely be looking to take more tutorials and branch out to different interdisciplinary topics to increase my all-around knowledge, which will really help me in the profession of therapy.
Additionally, I am extremely excited to get involved in research on campus more and more, especially now that I am an official neuroscience concentrator. I loved the research that I got to do this summer with EEGs, but I would love to learn more about fMRIs and other brain imaging, to reach towards the ultimate question of “How do brains differ in people with mental illnesses compared to those who do not have mental illnesses?” This internship definitely sparked some future thesis ideas. Beyond Williams, I am looking to pursue a doctorate degree in clinical psychology and/or clinical neuroscience, which will allow me to pursue research even further, and I am so grateful to have had some exposure to the graduate student work this summer with the narcissism study.
I am so immensely grateful to have had the opportunity to work at the Clinical Neuroscience and Psychopharmocology Research Unit at the University of Chicago this summer, and I cannot thank the Class of 1972 enough for allowing me to pursue my research passions. I am so looking forward to the future after this summer and cannot wait to get back in the lab and start answering some of the hardest questions out there that will help such an immense number of people.