A spring 2020 graduate (June) in biology from the University of Oregon, Rennie Kendrick will join the
Cembrowski lab on a prestigious Fulbright scholarship.
Slated to begin in the fall, but delayed at this time until January, she will be using big-data experimental and computational approaches to understand fear memory mechanisms in the brain. Kendrick has been interested in neuroscience since she submitted her grade 8 science project on memory to an institutional review board. Lured by a full scholarship to Oregon, she followed in her sister’s footsteps in applying for a Fulbright.
“I’ve known for a long time that I want to be a professor, and work in research, but didn’t want to go to grad school immediately after I graduated,” she said. “I wanted to go into a lab and get more research experience.”
The Cembrowski lab is her dream setting for doing just that. “It was a really big motivator, looking at the lab website and seeing Mark Cembrowski has a PhD in applied math,” Kendrick said. “That’s the direction the field is going – modeling in big data, and being able to process huge amounts of data from brain recordings. At U of O, I was just doing a biology focus, and then started taking linear algebra and advanced biological modeling. It’s blowing my mind how you can model these biological systems and
apply them to actual research questions.”
We look forward to welcoming Kendrick to the LSI, UBC and British Columbia.
Read more about this rising star in neuroscience on the University of Oregon website.