Charis Alexander hopes that her education and training could someday help science illuminate how people make critical life decisions, an ambition nurtured by her decade-long experience as a clinical research participant at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California (USC).
Now age 18, Alexander is graduating with a B.S. in neuroscience from USC and enters the Keck School M.D./Ph.D. program this fall. She plans to continue as a research participant while following in the footsteps of the neuroscientists she admires.
Alexander was the first participant recruited into the USC BrainChild study. The investigation began in 2014, following 220 children, ages 7 to 11 in the original cohort, from diverse populations in Los Angeles. The research team led by Kathleen Page, M.D., an associate professor of medicine at the Keck School of Medicine and Co-director of the Research Development core at the Southern California Clinical and Translational Science Institute (SC CTSI), was the first to identify that exposure in the womb to diagnosed maternal gestational diabetes disrupts a child's metabolisms and brain development...
Read the full article here.
