Congratulations to Tara Barron for successfully defending her dissertation!

On April 17, 2019, Neuroscience graduate student Tara Barron (pictured above) presented her dissertation defense titled: ‘Physiological Implications of Neuron-Oligodendrocyte Interaction’ to a lecture hall audience, whose members included her defense committee. She then went through a review of her dissertation and a question and answer process with the defense committee, before she was notified that she had successfully defended her dissertation and would be receiving her Ph.D.!  Tara is a PhD student and located in Dr. Hee Kim’s lab. Dr. Kim’s research interest is to understand regulatory mechanisms of presynaptic excitability and synaptic transmission in the central nervous system (CNS) during physiological or pathological conditions, using electrophysiology and imaging techniques.

Tara grew up in Minnesota and wanted to be a neuroscientist since she was 15. She came to Trinity University in San Antonio for their neuroscience program. Her first experience in the lab was in the lab of Ben Eaton doing drosophila genetics here at UT Health San Antonio. She took a “detour” after college to teach high school science and travel in South America. She started the IBMS PhD program in 2014 knowing that she wanted to pursue patch clamp electrophysiology and joined the lab of Jun Hee Kim, where she has been studying the physiology of neuron-oligodendrocyte interactions.

Future:

In June, Tara will start a postdoc position with Michelle Monje at Stanford University, where she will be studying neuron-glioma interactions. She aims to have an academic career as a Principal Investigator.

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