This weekend, Marvee Gay Espiritu ’12 will return to campus to share her perspective on student life with incoming first-years enrolled in the Office of Undergraduate Studies (OUS) summer program. That perspective includes her opportunity to conduct intensive neuroscience research and developing a special mentorship with Jun Yoshino, associate professor of psychology. Espiritu herself had participated in the OUS program, and that experience is how she met Yoshino in the first place.
After Espiritu took a class with Yoshino that summer, he recruited her into his lab as part of her National Science Foundation S-STEM scholarship. Espiritu had an interest in neuroscience because she’d studied it as a high school senior, during which time she even won first place in a brain competition at Long Island University. Also, she was particularly drawn to neuroscience “because two of my family members are suffering from neurological disorders,” Espiritu said.
She joined in on a study researching the effects of melatonin on multiple sclerosis, which Yoshino had been working on with other students. Specifically, the group studied the Experimental Autoimmune Encephalomyelitis model of multiple sclerosis in mice.
Marvee Espiritu ’12 conducts neuroscience research with Professor Jun Yoshino. Photo by Andrew Daddio
Over the next three years, Espiritu alternated between conducting the research with a partner during the summers and assisting seniors with the animal injections and observations during the school year. By the time Espiritu was a senior and began using the research as the basis for her thesis, she had made a discovery that turned the whole study on its head.
Yoshino had tasked her with trying to replicate researchers’ previous findings that treating the animals with melatonin decreased the clinical severity of multiple sclerosis. However, in attempting to repeat those results, Espiritu actually found that the opposite was true. “The melatonin made the animal in my study sicker,” she explained.
Now that Espiritu has graduated, a new crop of students has taken over the study, and they’re trying to replicate her findings. So far, from the updates she has been given, the current research group is getting the same results.
All of those hours spent in the lab (she estimates that she spent about 48 hours a week) have paved the way for Espiritu to meet her career goal of becoming a neurosurgical physician’s assistant. In the fall, she will begin the Physician’s Assistant Program at Le Moyne College in Syracuse.
Until then, she’s spending yet another summer at Colgate. But this time, instead of spending the summer as a “lab rat,” Espiritu will coordinate the resident advisers for the OUS pre–first-year summer program. She also plans to tell the incoming first-years about all that she experienced at Colgate, including learning from a professor who had a long-term impact. “Professor Yoshino is like a second dad; he was not just my adviser for classes, but my adviser for life.”