2014 National Institutes of Health Exceptional Summer Student Award

NIH

Along with her passion for solving the world water problem, Deepika is fascinated by the mysteries of the brain. The summer after her sophomore year, she was accepted to the highly competitive National Institutes of Health Summer Internship Program.  Deepika worked under the supervision of senior investigator Dr. Judith Walters (whose research focuses on Parkinson’s disease) in the National Institutes of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. As part of her internship, she read scientific papers on neurology, sorting through hundreds of neurological recordings, and had the opportunity to perform brain surgery on a rat!

Deepika received the Exceptional Summer Student Award, and her work titled “The Relationship between Spiking Activity and High Gamma Oscillations in the Ventral Medial Thalamus during L-dopa-induced Dyskinesia” was one of the top three projects. She was also selected to give a lecture on her research to an audience of NINDS faculty and her fellow summer interns.