About Me
Education
2022 - present Doctoral Candidate, Graduate Program for Neuroscience at Boston University.
2017 - 2021 B.A. Psychology, The University of Texas at San Antonio.
How I got into science
My name is Gabrielle Magalhães and I am currently a doctoral candidate in the lab of Dr. Heidi Meyer.
My journey to becoming a scientist wasn’t very straightforward. As a child, I loved reading about animals and plants at the school library and spent countless hours reading from my mother’s old nursing textbooks. I was always curious about understanding all living things, but as I got older, my interests started to turn towards understanding how the minds of living things work. I moved around a lot growing up, and didn’t have the most comfortable early life. As an adolescent, I moved to a city known across the United States for its extremely high rate of early life traumatic experiences. Many of the friends I made here experienced trauma in their early lives, and as a trauma survivor myself, I felt understood in a way I never had before. Unfortunately, the public schools that served us were not the best equipped to best serve us, and as such, many of us struggled academically and throughout our development. As I grew older, I watched how each of us grew in different directions. I saw that some people struggled more than others with mental health disorders, and it bothered me that I could not understand why everyone reacts so differently to similar stressful experiences. As a teenager, I made the decision to try and make some kind of career that would allow me to devote my life to understanding early life trauma, and how to improve the lives of youth affected by this.
After wandering throughout a few undergraduate courses, I ultimately settled on psychology. After I took a physiological psychology class, I became fascinated with behavioral neuroscience. I found behavioral neuroscience fascinating, as I could finally combine my lifelong love of studying animals and biology with my desire to help and educate youth affected by early life trauma. Since my undergraduate university did not have a neuroscience major during the time I attended it, I instead took every neuroscience class my alma mater offered and worked part-time as a research assistant in the lab of Dr. Alicia Swan. Following graduation, I worked as a full-time research assistant in the lab of Dr. Anthony Burgos-Robles before becoming a full-time technician in the lab of Dr. Heidi Meyer, where I am currently a doctoral candidate.Non-science biography
Outside of the lab, I love playing games, watching movies, reading books, painting/drawing, eating food, and going on bike rides. I have always been motivated to figure out what makes us human, what it means to be alive, and to explore a lot of those other big questions in life. I think there are many good ways to explore these questions, and art is a great medium for doing so. I initially began college as an American literature major (#beatnik4life), and I am also a fan of fantasy and science fiction books. I am also a lifelong hobby artist; I have been drawing and painting for as long as I can remember. I currently use an iPad and Procreate to draw, mostly using oil and charcoal inspired brushes. I am very into gaming, and have a deep love for role-playing video games and tabletops. I love spoiling my cats and cooking/baking.
