I completed my BS in Cognitive Neuroscience at UC, Santa Barbara. I then tech'ed for several years, primarily in the lab of Dr. Rafael Yuste at Columbia University, before starting the MD/PhD program at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. I defended my thesis in Jan 2011 under the mentorship of Dr. John H. Morrison, primarily working on developing new methods in the morphometric analysis of dendritic spines. In that context, I worked on spines in multiple species (mouse, rat, monkey), in several brain areas (cortex, hippocampus, amygdala, nucleus accumbens), and several disease models (aging, estrogen, addiction, fear conditioning). In the summer of 2011, I am returning to 3rd year of medical school while simultaneously trying to continue lab work under the dual mentorship of Drs. John H. Morrison and Eric J. Nestler on studying the neural networks underlying resilience to social defeat in mice. In medicine, my main interest is in psychiatry; I'm particularly interested in mood disorders and - more importantly - the resilience against these disorders in a select subpopulation of patients that undergo traumatic experiences.