Post baccalaureate IRTA Fellow
Kimberlyn
Bailey,
B.S.
Section on Critical Brain Dynamics
I work as a Post-Baccalaureate Intramural Research Training Award Fellow within the lab of Dr. Dietmar Plenz. I am a 2016 college graduate with degrees in Philosophy from State University of New York at Oswego and General Science from Le Moyne College. For the former degree, I concentrated in philosophy of science. For the latter, I focused on computer science and mathematics. My undergraduate degree was punctuated by a medical internship at Oswego Hospital, as well as summer fellowships for systems neuroscience at State University of New York Upstate Medical University, biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health and sociology of STEM at my home institution. While at the NIH, I also take advanced mathematics courses and continue to work on sociology of STEM and philosophy of science research.
Broadly construed, I am interested in neuroscience that focuses neither at the molecular level, nor at the abstract level of psychology, but rather the compelling area somewhere in-between. I am drawn to questions and research methods that put powerful computational tools to use and offer potential avenues for translational medicine. Our lab does exactly that, probing questions of how neuronal activity organizes itself in distinct, detectible patterns. We use a broad computational approach and investigate how these questions shed light on conditions like epilepsy and schizophrenia. As a Post-Baccalaureate Fellow, my aim is to learn as much as I can about the principles of computational neuroscience and to advance the study of neuronal avalanches a tiny bit further.