This presentation gives an overview of the honors thesis project in Cognitive Science I worked on with Dr. Dedre Gentner and Dr. Nina Simms of Northwestern's Cognition and Language Lab. The project, titled "Improving Stock and Flow Reasoning: Using Analogy and Graphs to Support Qualitative Understanding," attempted to improve people's understanding of stock and flow (SF) systems by drawing on a relational analogy between a familiar, everyday example of SF dynamics (a bathtub) and a complex, abstract example (climate change). We found that the relational analogy did not improve people's understanding of SF dynamics, but our results suggested that this may be due to the surface similarity between our training module and the questions we asked. 

In the summer of 2019, I worked under Dr. Mercedes Carnethon of the Feinberg School of Medicine's Department of Preventive Medicine. I worked primarily on designing a study that would assess how lifestyle factors (sleep, physical activity and nutrition) affect the cardiometabolic health of women who have recently given birth. Unfortunately, we finished the study's design just as the COVID-19 pandemic began, which meant that the project had to be shelved for the time being. However, I was able to contribute to ongoing research on the relationship between sleep and cardiometabolic health in a youth population, which was presented at the the American Heart Association EPI|Lifestyle 2020 conference. 

From November 2019 to June 2020, I worked under Dr. Eva Redei of the Feinberg School of Medicine's Department of Neuroscience. I assisted in ongoing research on the genetic factors which contribute to stress-enhanced fear learning in animal models of post-traumatic stress disorder.  We found that there is a relationship between the genetic propensity of rats to stress and their stress-enhanced fear learning. We also found sex-specific effects of shock intensity on fear memory.