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Kudos to Katie Salvati: NGP Outstanding Student Award

June 7, 2022 by zrb8mf@virginia.edu

Katie SalvatiCongratulations to Dr. Katie Salvati (Beenhakker Lab), the recipient of the 2022 Neuroscience Graduate Program Outstanding Student Award! Katie’s PhD work largely focused on resolving cellular and molecular events that trigger seizures. In one project, Katie used her experimental expertise to crack a nearly 100-year old question: how does hyperventilation trigger seizures in nearly 100% of patients with absence epilepsy? To tackle this question, Katie independently developed a new rat model of hyperventilation-triggered seizures that she then used to resolve basic, seizure-generating mechanisms. In doing so, Katie discovered that higher-order thalamic nuclei localized near the brain’s midline are activated during hyperventilation-provoked respiratory alkalosis. In addition to publishing this work in eLife, Katie published two additional first author studies as well as three first author reviews/commentaries. Katie has recently started a postdoctoral researcher position at the University of California, San Francisco, where she aims to use imaging tools to resolve large-scale seizure dynamics in the zebrafish. Thanks for making UVA Neuroscience and Pharmacology so proud!