Senior bioinformatics student Melissa Mercer recently participated in the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s Summer Research Academy, an undergraduate program offering summer scholarships for STEM students.

The academy allows students to advance their independent research projects and prepares them for competitive graduate or medical scientist training program applications.

Mercer’s research, sponsored by the Center for Addiction and Pain Prevention and Intervention (CAPPI), was conducted under the guidance of Jeremy Day, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Neurobiology at UAB. Her research focuses on computational neuroscience, analyzing 20 samples from rat striatal, cortical, and hippocampal neurons. Mercer aims to detect differences in gene expression between samples treated with potassium chloride (KCI) and a control vehicle.