Tolbert Scholarship Recipients

Michelle Gordon

Spring 2022 Recipient

With support from the Tolbert scholarship, I was able to bolster my academic profile by conducting research on the development of vocal problems in Parkinson's disease using the zebra finch songbird as a model system to study the underlying brain mechanisms. Over the course of the summer, I learned how to care for a colony of zebra finches and how to prepare histological sections of finch brain utilizing a cryostat. Additionally, I learned how to prepare and run immunohistochemistry experiments where antibodies are applied to examine neuronal protein expression patterns in the finch brain and visualize them using fluorescence microscopy. Although our research is still ongoing, the data we collected will be reported in a scientific paper and it will also contribute towards my senior honors thesis understanding vocal changes in the aging brain.