#TraineeTuesday: Lamisa Musarat

From the Lab to the Limelight - Blog version of our #TraineeTuesdayTwitter series

This #TraineeTuesday, meet Lamisa Musarat, a postgraduate researcher in the Higley Lab! She recently presented a poster at #SfN23 on "Temporal control of whole-brain GCaMP expression for long-term widefield imaging of cortical networks."

In this project, Lamisa looked at the expression of GCaMP6s, a genetically-encoded calcium sensor, over time. GCaMP6s is a variant of GCaMP6, one of many genetically-encoded fluorescent reporters of neural activity. She enjoyed the opportunity to enhance her scientific communication skills and learn from other presenters and lecturers.

“Attending SfN was a great learning experience in terms of learning to analyze certain types of data for the first time, putting it all together in a coherent and impactful format on Illustrator and presenting it to an audience of a variety of scientific backgrounds,” she said. “It was my first time presenting at such a large conference.”

Growing up in a research family, Lamisa’s dreams of pursuing research started at a young age. “I was always fascinated by our mind and curious about how our body allowed us to experience the world around us and replay those experiences in the future,” she said.

By the start of high school, she decided she wanted to pursue neuroscience. Lamisa then enrolled in Stony Brook University to study biology and psychology. In her first year, she gained research experience in clinical neuroscience, however, by her sophomore year the COVID-19 pandemic hit, changing the trajectory of her next two years.

“It had left me unsatisfied and disappointed with the amount/type of research experience I had gotten out of my undergraduate career,” she said. Her next research opportunity was not until senior year, when she studied synthetic/molecular biology through iGEM, a worldwide synthetic biology competition for undergraduates.

She decided to take a gap year to pursue research in her field of interest, systems neuroscience. Yale was one of her top choices, due to both the strength of its neuroscience research and its location (close to her family in Long Island). After many cold emails, she was surprised to be offered a post-grad research position by Michael Higley, MD, PhD. It was her first time hearing about a post-graduate program.

Now in her second year, she’s learned “way more” than she ever hoped to.

Over the last fourteen months, Lamisa has worked on a variety of projects, each teaching her unique techniques and skills. One of the first procedures she learned was intracranial surgeries, which helped her hone her surgery and histology skills. This proved vital when it came time to learn mesoscopic surgeries and imaging during her GCaMP6s time-course project.

Lamisa also recently started working on a new project alongside Paras Patel, a postdoc in her lab. She’ll be studying cortical dynamics following α-synuclein aggregation in a mouse model of Parkinson’s disease. Using their particular model, they can track for changes in somatic activity as α-synuclein aggregates build up. This project has given her the chance to learn even more tools, such as two-photon window surgeries and two-photon imaging.

Throughout her academic journey, Lamisa has accumulated over five years of research experience across the fields of microbiology, synthetic biology, cognitive psychology, and systems neuroscience. She also has a strong passion for advocacy, having spearheaded numerous initiatives over the last seven years.

Lamisa will take these skills forward as she applies to neuroscience PhD programs this cycle. Going forward, she hopes to study neural circuits under altered or diseased states, with a focus on learning and memory.

“Ultimately, my aim is to combine my love for research and advocacy into all of my future endeavors, where I hope to create a significant influence in both the world of science and society as a whole,” Lamisa said.