By Michelle Jaffee; Photos by Jackie Hart
This summer, Anna D’Ambrosio, 21, might be found analyzing data about research participants’ home lives during childhood. On other days, she is affixing EEG caps to measure electrical activity in the brain.
A rising college senior majoring in neuroscience and economics, D’Ambrosio is carrying out her lab tasks under an expert mentor at the McKnight Brain Institute, as part of research exploring why some people are more vulnerable to addiction.
For undergraduate students like D’Ambrosio, such hands-on laboratory work can be pivotal — even life-changing.
And through her program, the University of Florida’s Summer Neuroscience Internship Program, nicknamed “SNIP,” she is following in the footsteps of 119 undergrads from throughout the U.S. who have completed this training opportunity.
“This is a taste of what grad school is like,” said D’Ambrosio, a SNIP intern in the lab of Amanda Elton, Ph.D.
“Working with people younger than me, older than me — that type of collaboration — and also having a cohort of my peers who are just as passionate about a variety of different neuroscience topics is really helpful because it puts you in that state of mind to keep working on this, and it really motivates you,” she said.
Celebrating SNIP’s 10th anniversary this summer, program leaders with UF’s Department of Neuroscience and the McKnight Brain Institute are reflecting upon its success and looking to the future.
Of students who have completed the curriculum so far, over 90% have gone on to pursue careers in science or medicine. Meanwhile, this summer, 13 new participants — four from UF and nine from other colleges — are working in MBI labs, focusing on some of the most vexing disorders of the brain.
SNIP was first established to help recruit top students to UF’s neuroscience graduate program and expand access to state-of-the-art training and development for undergrads interested in neuroscience careers, said Sara Burke, Ph.D., SNIP founder and director of UF’s Center for Cognitive Aging and Memory Clinical Translational Research.
“UF is one of the best institutions to train at, in probably the world, in relation to age and age-related cognitive decline and then also neurodegenerative disorders that are associated with advanced aging,” said Burke, who serves as a SNIP mentor each summer.
“So, we get a lot of students coming here that want to do that type of research. And really, they’re the next generation that’s going to carry this work forward, so it’s really important to feed and nurture that pipeline,” she said.
Together with Jada Lewis, Ph.D., and later with Jeremy McIntyre, Ph.D., Burke built a competitive program that offers hands-on mentorship by experts in their fields — and also hourly pay, housing and career-development workshops, in addition to lab experience.
With early financial support from the MBI, the McKnight Brain Research Foundation and the mentors themselves, SNIP grew into a program that teaches undergrads from across the country how to design experiments, run proper controls, present at a conference, contribute to a scientific paper, write a CV and respond to interview questions, among other important skills.
“SNIP is open to everyone, not just UF students,” said current SNIP Director Karina Alviña, Ph.D. “The majority of the students every year come from outside, and we try to focus on students that in their home institutions do not have the same research opportunities that we have here at UF.”
For Jose Torrellas, the skills developed as a 2021 SNIP intern — during his undergrad years at the University of Central Florida — have provided a foundation for his current doctoral program in neuroscience at UF.
“What I’m doing in grad school now as a Ph.D. student going into my third and fourth year, those were the things that were introduced to me during SNIP,” said Torrellas, now a trainee in the lab of Paramita Chakrabarty, Ph.D.
Torrellas, 24, first became interested in studying neurodegenerative diseases as a high school student when he played his French horn at a memory care center.
“Seeing a glimpse of making their lives a little bit better kind of made me want to figure that out from a scientific perspective,” he said.
But it was the SNIP program that introduced the roadmap to get there.
“For me, I’ve used all of those skills every day,” he said. “And I will continue to use them.”
To learn how to support the Summer Neuroscience Internship Program, click here or contact Senior Director of Development Caitie Deranek Stewart at stewartc1@ufl.edu.
