The National Science Foundation is interested in Felicha Candelaria’s research. The three-year fellowship she was awarded will allow her to focus on her research into memory and how drugs affect the brain’s mechanism for encoding and retrieving long-term memories. Specifically, her research focuses on the consolidation and reconsolidation of spatial memory.
Candelaria, a doctoral student in psychology, believed she might go to medical school back when she was attending Los Lunas High School. But as she worked with researchers in the Initiative to Maximize Student Diversity (IMSD) program at UNM, she slowly realized she was most interested in research.
“I’ve always been interested in psychology and memory in particular, “she says. “So when I joined the IMSD program, I went into the Department of Neurosciences, and just being part of that area of research kept fueling my interest in the subject matter.”
It was a high school teacher that noticed her interest in science and pushed her to apply for a summer program apprenticeship at the University of Wisconsin. Her participation in that program caught the interest of Seattle University, which offered her a full scholarship when she graduated. Candelaria did part of her undergraduate studies in Seattle, but the pull of family brought her back to New Mexico and to UNM.
Candelaria has undergraduate degrees in biology and psychology, and is now pursuing graduate work in psychology with an emphasis in Behavioral Neuroscience. The lab she works in has an interest in investigating the neurobiological basis of learning memory and behavior. She uses rats to investigate spatial navigation in the Morris water task. In the Morris water task, rats are placed in a pool where they must learn to use various cues to navigate to a hidden platform located in a specific quadrant.
In her experiments she trains rats to navigate to a precise platform location in the pool. After the memory has been consolidated or stored, she reactivates the previously stored memory and injects the rats with a solution containing a chemical that is structurally related to marijuana to determine the effects of cannabinoids on memory reconsolidation.
She evaluates the rat’s performance at a later point in time to determine whether they can remember to swim to the platform they were trained to find. Candelaria has pilot data which shows that cannabinoids do have a detrimental effect on memory reconsolidation as predicted, and is expecting to learn more about the specific relationships as she conducts more experiments this semester.
She believes “identifying the conditions in which disruption of reconsolidation processes does or does not have damaging effects on memory represent important contributions to this area of research. Also cannabinoids exist naturally in our body. In fact, they are synthesized by neurons on demand. If we can find out why this process occurs and relate it to the forgetting of memories that would be wonderful.”
If her research goes as predicted there is the potential for future pharmacological treatments derived from cannabinoids to target fragmented memories.
After Candelaria completes her doctoral research at the university, she will pursue a post doctoral position and eventually become a research scientist in the field of learning and memory. She will look for a faculty position which would also allow for substantial time in the laboratory.
Influential UNM Professors:
Derek Hamilton, assistant professor, Psychology
Kevin Caldwell, assistant professor, Neuroscience
Margaret Werner-Washburne, professor, Biology
Steven Verney, assistant professor, Psychology
Research funded by:
National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
UNM – Initiatives to Maximize Student Diversity (IMSD) program
Graduate and Professional Student Association at UNM
Media Contact: Karen Wentworth, (505) 277-5627; e-mail: kwent2@unm.edu
Posted by scarr at September 6, 2007 09:39 AM