SRP Trainee Mitra Geier was able to attend The International Neurotoxicology Association and Neurobehavioral Teratology Society joint meeting last month with her Externship Award from the SRP Training Core. The aim of the Externship Award is to support opportunities for SRP trainees that will provide enhanced experiential learning activities that benefit the trainee’s career goals.

Networking and face-time with peers and scientists is an essential part of an Externship opportunity.  At the conference, Mitra was able to interact and formalize her connections with other trainees from five different SRP centers across the country, including students whose work involved epidemiology, cell culture, fish, and mammalian model systems.  She will be reporting back to the OSU SRP trainees at their monthly meeting about what she learned from the other trainees at the conference related to their Superfund Centers, their activities, and their interests.

Mitra was also able to attend sessions and interact with leading scientists. She attended sessions to learn about different methods for assessing neurotoxicity, including mechanistic and behavioral effects, especially in the context of how the different models can be used to approach similar questions.   Mitra attended the sessions on neurotoxicants in air pollutants and inhaled particles, which are particularly relevant to her research. There was also sessions related to neurotoxicology screening studies and non-mammalian models of neurotoxicity including fish studies that were highly applicable to her screening work in zebrafish. The sessions on epigenetics and the microbiome were not directly related to her work, but she found them very useful in her long-term research interest development.

Mitra Geier is a PhD student working under Dr. Robert Tanguay with Project 3: Systems Approach to Define Toxicity of Complex PAH Mixtures.

Mitra received her B.S. in Environmental Science from Western Washington University.  Her current research is focused on defining the developmental toxicity of parent and methylated PAHs, the neurobehavioral effects of these compounds during the embryonic stage and in adulthood, and the molecular pathways involved in these effects using the embryonic zebrafish model.