NC State offers amazing opportunities for undergraduates to engage, develop, present, and publish research. In our lab, we’re very proud to have Hannah Stylers. Hannah is just now starting her junior year and already rocks some impressive research credentials!

Hanna presented her work on enzyme modified electrodes this summer during the 18th Annual NCSU Summer Undergraduate Research and Creativity Symposium. Working under one of our 2nd year grad students, Hannah has been developing methods for electrochemical detection of new analytes not previously detectable by FSCV.

Congrats, Hannah! She will be continuing her summer projects into the school year—exploring the brain’s use of glucose and lactate in real time.

Electrochemical circuits are often used to study energy, but what about biological sources of energy? How the brain uses its energy stores is still not fully understood. As such, Sombers’ lab is looking for answers.

Alex Forderhase has been producing some sweet data using enzyme-modified electrodes for glucose and lactate monitoring. Here she is presenting her work last month for the 20th Annual Student/Postdoc Symposium of the W.M. Keck Center for Behavioral Biology:

Alex Forderhase at the Keck Center for Behavioral Biology symposium in spring 2019

Alex has been crafting new techniques for looking at electro-chemically inactive molecules. By bringing in new molecules for analysis by FSCV, she can monitor brain activity in new, unexpected ways!