At the Rhine River outlook when my Swiss peers gave me a tour of Basel’s Old Town.

Author: Amber Jared | Major: Biology | Semester: Summer 2024

If you would’ve told me a year ago that I would spend five weeks in Switzerland doing psychology research, I would not have believed you. The rollercoaster of how I gained this opportunity was not an average internship application process. At first, I applied to the Gilman Scholarship program for study abroad, and their new STEM supplemental award gave me the idea to look for research opportunities abroad while I would already be in Europe for the Health Teams Abroad in Sweden program. I talked it over with my honors thesis mentor, Dr. Josiah Leong, and we decided to reach out to a researcher at Jonkoping University in Sweden who was doing work in the field of child psychology. However, this route didn’t work out. When I thought this idea of researching abroad might be too far-fetched, I met with Dr. Chelsea Hodge and talked with Dr. Leong again to see what my options were and what the best plan for me could be. It turned out that Dr. Leong knew of five different researchers throughout Europe who he’d collaborated with in the past. Luckily, the first researcher I reached out to, Dr. Loreen Tisdall, matched perfectly with my needs, interests, and timetable. She also had a spot available in her lab for an undergraduate research intern during the summer. This match made in heaven led me to the University of Basel in Switzerland.

I first joined Dr. Leong’s lab at the beginning of my sophomore year at the U of A. His lab, Fullstack Affective Neuroscience, is currently using the NIH’s Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development longitudinal study to analyze the risk-reward centers of the brain. My initial interest was in how pubertal hormones might lead to differences in how males and females process information that goes through this risk-reward system. This first research question quickly grew into my current honors thesis that’s now comprised of three aims: 1) connecting structure in two tracts from the baseline year to function in the region of interest that these tracts lead to two years later 2) investigating if pubertal hormones act as moderators between the structure-function connection and 3) investigating if function acts as a mediator between structure and behavior four years later. Fortunately for me, Dr. Tisdall also took an interest in pubertal hormones, and she was the one who coined the term “conNAcctome” to refer to white matter tracts projecting to the nucleus accumbens, which is the main brain region I’m interested in. One of her lab’s ongoing projects is to create a model using the same data set and investigate which qualities have an effect on the sample, with one of the major conditions being puberty markers and hormones. Because of our similarities, Dr. Tisdall took me under her wing and guided me as I started the research process. While I was an intern at the University of Basel, I worked on an AsPredicted pre-registration with the hopes that I can turn my thesis into a research paper in the future. I also led a journal club as we reviewed two journal articles that were relevant to my research topic. I met with Dr. Tisdall at least four times a week to check in on my progress and gain feedback on my R code, abstract and preregistration writing, and literature review. Towards the end of my research internship, I shifted my focus to preparing for a research conference I’d attend in Tulsa when I returned to the US. While in Basel, I wrote the abstract for this conference as well as completed the poster to present the preliminary findings of my research. Dr. Tisdall was also in the early stages of working with the ABCD data set, so it was very interesting to see how we could all bounce ideas off each other to further our progress in different directions. I loved getting to be a part of a research lab full time and seeing what a career in psychology could potentially look like.

I didn’t know much about Switzerland (or Europe in general) going into this summer. However, I quickly learned that Basel, Switzerland was where I was meant to be. The staff was super welcoming to me, and the masters students who I worked closely with treated me as one of their own. They all showed me around and invited me to outings and events which allowed me to embrace their culture. For instance, we attended many public viewings of the men’s European soccer cup and went for numerous walks around the Old Town where I gained so many historical lessons from locals who added personal touches. My peers also suggested other parts of Switzerland and encouraged me to take weekend trips while I was there. On the weekends, I went to Zurich, Geneva, Lucerne, and Bern, all of which are major cities in Switzerland with rich histories and stunning scenery. One of my favorite memories was going with some fellow students to hike in the mountains and riding the cable cars up to the very top where I saw some of the most breathtaking Swiss views. International opportunities and internship experiences are definitely what you make of them. It was such an honor to be able to combine the two and complete an independent international internship with Dr. Loreen Tisdall and the community at the University of Basel’s Center for Cognitive and Decision Sciences.