Name: Amuthini Arivazhagan
Class Year: 2025
Major: Neuroscience and Data Science
Hometown: Ellicott City, Md.
Internship Organization: Temple University
Internship Title: Research Assistant
Location: Philadelphia, Pa.
What's happening at your internship? We would love to hear what kind of work you are doing!
I am a research assistant in the Memory, Epigenetics & Addiction Lab at Temple University, under the direction of Dr. Mathieu Wimmer. Alongside other undergraduates, I help conduct various experiments using rodent models. My responsibilities include daily caretaking of the rats involved in the experiments, such as handling them, changing their bedding and food, and regularly weighing them. Additionally, I am working on a project that measures pain in rats through machine learning. I am training to use different software that can track their movements and categorize them on a pain scale.
Why did you apply for this internship?
After spending a year working in a Behavioral Neuroscience lab studying memory in rodent models, I realized I wanted to broaden my interests and learn more about how addiction and pain are studied in neuroscience. This led me to reach out to Dr. Wimmer to join his lab. I had read papers from the Wimmer