Hi, my name is Sonia and I'm a rising junior in the computer science department. Although my major is computer science, I'm really interested in medicine and neuroscience, which is why this summer I worked with my God mentor Dakota Blackman, as a part of the Faulkner Lab, which is one of the many labs in the neuroscience department. Broadly speaking, my research this summer focused on brain areas that facilitate social aggression and hierarchy formation. As you may know, when animals aren't social groups, they tend to form hierarchies with the higher ranking individual being a little bit more dominant and aggressive, and the lower ranking individual being a little more subordinate and less aggressive. One of the brain regions that has been linked to these dominance and hierarchy formation behaviors is the eventual premium malaria nucleus, which is a bit of a mouthful, but we call it the PMB for short. The PMB is a tiny region within the hypothalamus of the brain that has this subpopulation of brain cells or neurons that are involved in hierarchy and dominance. Although this link has been made between the PMB and dominance behaviors, we really don't know much more about how how this works, like the actual mechanism behind how the PMB effects hierarchical behavior. Also, a lot of the studies on the PMB and in neuroscience in general have only been done on male mice. This is a result of a lot of bias towards male species in science, especially when it comes to studying aggression. But my mentor taught me is something that is really important to change. So the goals of my research this summer were to not only better understand the PMBs role in dominance behaviors in various social contexts, but also to figure out how hierarchy is displayed and females as well and sort of fill in those gaps by studying female aggression and dominance in a non maternal context rather than just male aggression. I ended up doing this in two major parts, the Summer. So because I wasn't actually able to go into the lab as you, as you know, I, I started by watching these on analyzed videos of previous experiments conducted by my mentor. You've still ML up. In these experiments. The experimental mouse was paired with a more dominant or less dominant mouse and then interacted together with the other mouse for a set amount of time. So what I did was I went through and analyze these videos, marking the start and stop times of different behaviors such as sniffing and attacking, which is really, really crazy. And mice would be interesting to see it. But I eventually just kind of analyze the types of behaviors males and females engage in when paired with more or less dominant mice. In this way, I began to build a behavioral repertoire to better understand the difference in behavior and point to certain behavioral patterns that may suggest similarities and differences in the brain, IE, the PM v. In the second part of the research. It basically involves brain data because recording devices were used to measure neural activity in the PMB as the mice were interacting in those original experiments. Because the behaviors we're already mapped out in the first part. The brain data can then be mapped onto the behaviors in order to understand the context and behaviors during which the PMBs actually active. Overall, I had a really great time researching these topics this summer. I learned so much from my mentor who is really, really cool and also super knowledgeable about the research process. The first setbacks started actually long before the internship started, which was having to come home and not being able to go in the lab. But my mentor really taught me a lot about flexibility and science and how we can still learn a lot of different things just by watching videos like I did and kind of analyzing that data. Those videos provided a rich database for me to work with and analyze. And so it was still really, really meaningful. Also, a lot of the research that I participated in was like with the lab manual. So going from a to B and like a linear process. But this time I learned a lot about keeping an open mind and asking questions that can lead to different ways of analyzing things or maybe different gate your experiments. Finally, I was really, really touched by the impacts that this kind of research can have. It deals with finally, analyzing female data. And one thing I learned was that research is the basis for a lot of different things in our society. Not only medical kind of practices, but also just social ideas and our general outlook on certain, certain ideas and things. And in this case, by not studying female aggression, it's not really a well-known thing in our general day-to-day lives. And so it's really important to fill in those gaps. I'm just really honored that I was able to help with that and have that impact.