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Jonathan Rubin

  Undergraduate
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I’ve been working in the Schaffer-Nishimura Lab for two and a half years. I am a senior undergraduate graduating in May 2013 and am currently applying to graduate school. The focus of my research has been on the effects of non-traumatic dorsal spinal venous occlusion on spinal cord injury in mice. Experiments developed by myself and carried out in conjunction with my graduate student, Matt have led to the observation that blood flows in two directions along the dorsal spinal vein. Additionally, the distance of these dorsal venous occlusions to branch points along the dorsal spinal vein affects the global change in blood flow of feeder venules. This has major implications to both researchers and clinicians. For researchers, spinal cord injury models will have to take this fact into account when observing pathology of spinal cord injuries. Since the vascular architecture of the spinal cord has such a high variance across animals, some sort of standardization procedure must be used in future experiments. For clinicians, our results suggest that an occlusion in one part of the dorsal vein may be more harmful than in other parts. Because of this, physicians will want to carefully monitor patients with spinal cord infarcts since clots have been shown to dislodge and travel to different locations. I am a scholar in the Biology Scholars Program.

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