User:Danijimenez14

I am a current undergraduate at Washington University in St Louis. Majoring in Biology and minoring in Psychological and Brain Sciences.

I began working in the Strassmann Queller Lab, the summer of 2014 through the Summer Scholars in Biology and Biomedical Research Program and have continued to work there. I have conducted research on the relationship between the model organism Dictyostelium discoideum and the bacteria associated with them. I have worked on  projects identifying which bacteria are present in D. discoideum sori, studying the effects of difficult to culture endosymbionts on their hosts, and studying interactions between different mating types.

This past summer, I worked in a research lab the studied the neural basis of vocal learning using songbirds, more specifically zebra finches, as a model organism. We studied the behavioral impact of altering expression levels of transcription factors like FoxP2, which is expressed in Area X, a part of the song learning pathway in the striatum.