Amanda Simon Email & Phone Number

New York, Ny, Us

New York, New York

My dissertation focuses on the effects of Traumatic Brain Injury on pain signaling pathways in the brain, and how that can negatively impact motor recovery. To study this, I make use of our lab's secondary blast injury model, where we mimic the effects of blast-related traumatic brain injury. I focus primarily on a brain stem nucleus called the Parabrachial Nucleus - a sensory hub that receives a significant portion of pain signaling input from the body - because we saw a great deal of damage in this nucleus and the regions it projects to in our mouse model. I conduct my research via ex vivo MRI analysis, in vivo electrophysiology and behavioral experiments

New York, New York, United States

I worked as a Teaching Assistant for the Advances in Neuroscience Journal Club course. With the aid of another teaching assistant, I managed correspondence with students in the course, facilitated paper discussions and graded students for attendance and participation.

New York, New York

Lebanon, New Hampshire

I had the opportunity to work at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center with Dr. Alan Green on the laboratory's Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) project. For this project, we applied DBS to reward circuit structures to modulate addictive behavior, using rodent animal models. Despite this being my first major research experience, I made significant contributions to the study that include implanting electrodes in the animals, collecting and analyzing data for our study on modulating binge eating with nucleus accumbens stimulation, and even developing more efficient designs for cables and adaptors for the stimulation apparatus. Not only was I able to find that Deep Brain Stimulation can indeed modulate binge behavior in some individuals, but I also took further steps to find out how this may occur and why individuals respond differently to stimulation using electrophysiological recordings. I even had the opportunity to conduct my own independent project on using deep brain stimulation in the nucleus accumbens and the prefrontal cortex to modulate binge drinking behavior in an animal model, the results of which I presented at the New England Science Symposium in 2017. I also presented my prior research at the college-wide Karen E. Wetterhahn Science Symposium. Our laboratory has even published some of our findings for this project in Frontiers in Neuroscience. This work has given me vital experience in manipulating rodent models of human disease, conducting behavioral experiments, neuromodulation, and neuroimaging via EEG.

Doctor Of Philosophy - Phd, Neuroscience

Bachelor'S Degree, Neuroscience, Asian And Middle Eastern Studies

New York State Honors Regents Diploma