Amber Alzufari

Author: Amber Alzufari | Majors: Biology and Psychology

My name is Amber Alzufari, and I am a student in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences studying biology and psychology. My mentor is Dr. Grant Shields in the psychology department. I spent the spring semester of 2022 developing my research project, and I intend to have it fully finished by the end of the fall semester of 2022. In the future, I hope to attend medical school.

My research project exams how different types of stress- early adversity and recent life stress- can interact (or not) to affect different maladaptive eating patterns (or not). I decided on this topic because it fits in with my mentor’s interests and my own; also, we felt it to be relevant to the current literature on the effects of stress on overall health. My project analyzes a college-aged sample, a group known to have high reported stress levels and disordered eating behaviors, making it particularly relevant to our demographic.

I joined Dr. Shields’ lab in December 2020 after looking into labs that would merge my interests in both biology and psychology. After meeting with Dr. Shields and discussing our research interests, I felt the ASCAN (Arkansas’s Stress, Cognition, and Affective Neuroscience) lab was a great fit for me. I homed in on this project nearly a year later. I wasn’t sure what exactly I wanted to study at first, but I did know I wanted it to have something to do with the connection between stress and health. I narrowed in on this project after reading various articles about stress and different aspects of health and seeing a deficiency regarding stress and eating behaviors. I approached my mentor with an idea, and he helped me narrow it down even further.

Working on this project solo has taught me a lot. Since I already had the data ready to use, I jumped right into data analysis using a statistical coding program. Dr. Shields helped me with the initial setup of the code; however, I would occasionally struggle using the program on my own. So, I would look up various tutorials, figure it out roughly (enough to get by), and then clean it up to be more effective with the help of my mentor. The biggest challenge that I faced was a lack of confidence; because this was my first time working on a project like this with only weekly check-ins, I felt lost more often than not. However, as I got further through the semester and further through my project, I gained confidence as time went on.

My mentor was a great help to me. He constantly provided feedback, and we would meet weekly to check on project progress. While he expected a reasonably consistent show of progress every week, he would understand if some weeks were more challenging for me to get as much done as we had initially planned. In the long run, that sort of understanding has helped me produce a much better-quality paper than would have been made if I spent the semester rushing to meet deadlines. Dr. Ramey was also an incredible help seeing as she allowed me to utilize the data from a collection she had done a few years prior!

While I haven’t had the opportunity to travel to any conferences (yet), I did get a chance to present my research at the poster session the University of Arkansas held. I hope to finish writing up my findings soon and get my paper submitted for review!