How I got into a lab and it changed my life
By Cristina Schiaffo UA’26 and Jim Stellar
Cristina and I met when she was a freshman and have stayed in contact over the years now writing this blog together in her junior year. She is working in a lab of a professor of behavioral neuroscience at the university at Albany. So, maybe our first question is how do you feel about it?
I absolutely love the lab. I started working there in the spring of my freshman year and it makes this my fifth semester. This semester I have been mostly slicing brain tissue for staining. And then I parceled the images on the computer to examine different brain areas, such as the basal lateral area of the amygdala. The idea was to see how different areas contained the various types of neurons. These brains had come from male and female rats put under stress to see how that changed brain function in these areas. The overall goal was to study effects of stress on enhancing later fear learning.
So what happened next?
This academic year was spent helping with a pilot study relating to the estrus cycle and its connection to the development of stress enhanced fear learning. I continued the learning mentioned above and learned how to do vaginal lavages to determine (4-day) estrus cycle of the female rats and males underwent sham lavages. This is important because the estrogen and progesterone levels vary in this cycle (like they do in human cycles), and that could affect the experimental treatments in this lab model that compares male and female behaviors.
So what happens in the fall of 2025?
In the Fall, which I’m looking forward to, I will be much more involved in writing with scientific papers that represent this work. I got a head start because my principal investigator went over how a scientific paper should be set up in a laboratory meeting. For example:
- The title should be specific and declarative.
- Then an abstract is next, which should summarize the research by containing key elements such as the major problem being addressed.
- The introduction has a large scientific literature base that could include upwards to one hundred articles, which would be cited in the references, and really sets up why we did the experiment and what kind of problem we were trying to solve using animals as a model for humans.
- The rest of the sections are the methods and results and then a discussion section follows, which ties the literature in the introduction section to our results. This is the most important section because this is what science means. If we don’t write up these papers, then nobody will know what we have done in the lab and we won’t get any funding for future experiments.
I learned a lot and feel like I am ready to jump in now.
Fascinating. What do you think you have discovered about yourself from this unique opportunity to be in a professor’s lab doing cutting-edge neuroscience research on an important topic and trying to publish?
I discovered a passion for doing research. When I first came to college, I thought I wanted to make my career be more in the clinical field. I was thinking about going into pediatric neuropsychology. Getting experience in the lab made me switch my plans all around. I knew I didn’t want to sit behind a desk and be talking to people all day. I needed to do something that would keep my hands constantly moving.
What I think that you have just described is the heart and the head. The head knows the recipe (as you bulleted above). The heart knows how it feels and therefore what is the significance (as you wrote just above).
What is very interesting to me is that you also invoke movement. In addition to the limbic system (e.g. the “heart”) that is located in the midbrain, the other major structure in the midbrain is the basal ganglia which is involved in movement (think Parkinson’s disease). Also, movement is part of motivation or it can be. After all, the word “emotion” has the word “motion” within it.
