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Hi, I'm Andrea and I'm a Psychology and Chemistry major at Bryn Mawr.  Until very recently, my plan for after graduation was to go right into a PhD program in behavioral neuroscience next year.  Instead, I'm going to take a year or two off to do some more lab work and hopefully make a more informed decision about what I want to do with myself after grad school.

I spent my summer at the University of Minnesota working in a lab that does a lot of work on opiate withdrawal in rats.  As a result, I've become very interested in addiction and reward pathways in the brain.  I'd be interested in discussing several aspects of addiction in class, including the process of forming an addiction, the withdrawal process, as well as clinical treatments for drug addiction.

Looking at some of the topics we discussed last week, I'm finding myself more and more interested in the topic of the use of drugs vs. psychotherapy (or some combination of the two).  I've never been particularly interested in many clinical aspects of psychology, but this is a huge issue, and I'd like to explore it more fully in class.  I haven't read any studies that look at neurological changes as a result of psychotherapy, but I'm sure they're out there, and I'd be interested in looking at how various methods of "fixing" the brain are actually changing things.