Meghan
Many Vanderbilt researchers spend a lot of time trying to figure out how the human brain works. One such researcher is Meghan Collins, a Neuroscience and Cognitive Sciences double major and French minor. Meghan, originally from Andover Massachusetts, has spent much of her time at Vanderbilt working in the Computation Memory Laboratory, a research laboratory in the Department of Psychology that investigates the neural machinery of the brain that is involved with forming, storing, and retrieving memories.
One of her most recent projects investigated how the condition of schizophrenia affects certain aspects of memory. Madison says, “this past summer, I was investigating correlations between different types of memory in those with schizophrenia as well as a control population. I looked at a lot of different aspects of memory, such as working or short-term memory, free recall memory, delayed free recall memory, a bunch of different things.” Her hope is that this research will be able to pinpoint brain the structures involved with certain aspects of memory. “The idea behind this research is that if you can find that certain memory tasks are correlated with each other, this might point out that the same region of the brain is causing problems if a person shows deficits among multiple tasks.”
This is just one of many projects that Meghan has been working on during her time at Vanderbilt. Meghan recounts how her involvement in research has grown as she gained more experience, “My involvement with research started out pretty minor, and it has continued to grow. I’ve been working in the lab since my sophomore year, and so I’ve worked on a lot of projects. Right now, I’m doing my senior honors thesis. My work this past summer was the initial stepping stone for my current project. Now, I’m designing my own experiment having to do with memory salience in people with schizophrenia. I’m manipulating certain features of words and the way they are presented to patients in order to investigate how people with schizophrenia remember things differently than from other people. At this point, I’m completely in charge of the experiment. I designed it. I’m recruiting the participants. I’m working with the participants and doing all of the analyses. At this point, I enjoy having a lot of independence in the lab.”
Regarding the benefits of research on her undergraduate experience, Meghan says, “I’ve built a lot of really good relationships through research. I’m very close on both a personal and professional level with the people in my lab. My relationship with my primary investigator has been a very good mentoring relationship. Meghan does caution, though, that research may not be the easiest endeavor. “I think research can be a little hard to warm up to at first because there is such a steep learning curve. When you start you are essentially an intelligent but unskilled worker and you need to put in the time to build up the skills specific to the lab so you can play a major role later on.
For students interested in research, Meghan recommends investigating professors and reaching out. “It never hurts to send an email to a professor or to a department chair asking about the type of research you are interested in pursuing. I spent time scrolling through the professors and their research interests on the Vanderbilt neuroscience project webpage. I just sent a few emails and met a few professors. Meeting with people and seeing their lab was a great way to start.” Meghan also recommends being open to the variability in positions that are available, “Any given semester, different professors are in different positions to take on undergraduates based on what is going on in their labs or with their teaching schedules. You may have to talk to a few people, but finding a research position wasn’t terribly difficult.”