Learn about India Pursell, a 2024 Early Career Policy Ambassador and graduate student, as she details her advocacy journey and her passion for promoting early involved in STEM for young girls.

India Pursell (she/her) is a first-generation, Creole-Caucasian neuroscientist completing her doctoral training at Tulane University Brain Institute in New Orleans, Louisiana.

With the use of emergent state-of-the-art technologies and the ever-increasing complexity of our understanding of molecular pathways and neural networks, it is becoming more challenging to present the latest discoveries in clear and impactful ways. The lead illustrator for Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Jennie Vallis, will describe strategies to cut through the complexity and jargon to reveal our discoveries in elegant and understandable ways.

Karen Malacon (she/her) is pursuing an MD/PhD in neuroscience at Stanford, studying early life influenza’s impact on brain function, and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in neurobiology with a minor in global health.

Noële Certain is a postdoctoral scholar at Yale University, with a PhD in molecular and cellular pharmacology and an MS in biochemistry and cell biology from Stony Brook University, and a BS in biology from St. Joseph’s College.

Krystal M. Santiago Colon (she/her) is a third-year PhD candidate in pharmacology at the University of Michigan, studying epilepsy mechanisms, with a biology bachelor’s from the University of Puerto Rico at Cayey.

Andoni I. Asencor (he/him) received his BA in neuroscience from Boston University in 2020, worked as a researcher at the University of Miami, and is now pursuing a neuroscience PhD at UCSF.

SfN, in partnership with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and Midnight Snacks animation studio, developed a series of introductory videos for neuroscientists to enhance the rigor and reproducibility of their research.

This session will discuss how ethnicity, gender, vocabulary, and culture affect the types of experiments scientists perform, how they interpret their findings, and what career decisions they make. This includes the terminology that neuroscience uses to describe regions and functions of the brain.

Proper visualization of data is critical for accurately explaining one's research findings. This session discusses the importance of data visualization in scientific publishing, including underlying concepts, best practices when conveying results, and ethical ramifications of image manipulation.