Peering Into a Zebrafish Brain
Meet biology major Andrew Nguyen.
Hometown: Beaverton, Oregon
Thesis adviser: Professor Kara Cerveny [biology]
Thesis: “More Than Eats the Eye: Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Phagocytic Microglia in the Developing Zebrafish Optic Tectum”
What it’s about: The complex cellular behavior of microglia.
What it’s really about: Peering into a zebrafish brain to look at different cells. I used to imagine things like this as science fiction.
In high school: I was a chronic underachiever. I wasn’t very interested in the stuff I was learning, other than biology and chemistry. I would mostly just sit in school, waiting to go play tennis and just let out all the energy I had pent up. I got interested in Reed because I liked that they encouraged you to go beyond your syllabus. Eventually, I found my place in Kara Cerveny’s lab.
Influential professor: I would say that Kara Cerveny’s developmental biology course really transformed my view of molecular and cellular biology.
Influential course: I took a class called Plants and Politics because I was like, “I’ll bite. What do plants and politics have to do with each other?” It made me really think about Reed’s beautiful campus. This whole campus is almost perfectly cultivated in terms of its horticulture.
Outside the classroom: I taught at OMSI—that was really fun. I basically spent a summer getting familiar with a bunch of first and third graders and teaching them scientific concepts ranging from basic biology to geology—we had a volcanoes class. Whenever I tried to dumb something down, the kids would be annoyed with me. They’d be like, “I don’t want that. I want something I can reasonably work through with your help.”
Financial aid: Over half of my tuition came from financial aid. It’s really helpful, too, because my brother, who’s one year younger than me, is going to college. It was honestly really important for our family to receive financial aid, because paying for multiple college tuitions at a time is a really big dinner-table conversation.
What’s next? I am now a research assistant in the Vollum Institute at OHSU. The Yang lab, where I am working, researches the role of neurons in motor control using Drosophila melanogaster. I will be working at the position for a few years before a applying to graduate school for neuroscience or neurobiology.
Tags: Academics, Students, Thesis, What is a Reedie?