My name is Ariana Anderson and we are at the Semel Institute at UCLA and I'm a statistician
working in psychiatry. Well, so working in psychiatry as a statistician is very interesting,
because in psychiatry there's is not really any good way to measure mental illness other
than observing symptoms. And so one thing I'm working on is how to better measure the
symptoms and how to get concrete brain measurements of what makes and what defines mental illness.
So one way we can do it is through brain imaging techniques such as functional MRI. So if you
put people who have mental illness in the scanner, you can observe which areas of their
brain change when they are for example resting, just laying in the scanner or looking at something
daydreaming. Or when they are doing some sort of task and if you compare this activity between
patients which schizophrenia and without for example, you will be able to tell which areas
of the brain behave differently. That can give you more ideas of what is the underlying
mechanize behind the disorder. I'm originally from Texas, I grew up all around Texas. I
was born near San Antonio, I went to high school, a wonderful school in south Texas
called The Science Academy. And there, there was a very, very strong emphasis on preparing
us to understand and explore the world around us, and I believe that's what really helped
me to becoming a scientist later on. My parents are not scientist, my dad is actually a minister,
my mom's a homemaker and she raised five children. So I don't really think there's a specific
moment where I decided I wanted to do science in particular, I decided I wanted do math
though when I went to a math camp when I was in high school. And there we were exposed
to a branch of math called, "number theory" where we had to prove basic things that you
take for granted. So for example, how do we know that, "n x 1 = n." How do we know that
if you take two even numbers and add them together, you get another even number. So
having to prove and derive things that you would consider trivial, a trivial pattern
leads to a much wider branch of mathematics that for me, I found absolutely fascinating.
Which is why I decided to prove that, pursue that route for graduate school. I did math
for quite a while and at some point when you do too much math you get a world where there
are no more numbers. And to me that felt a little bit impractical because I had developed
a skill and I wasn't actually able to use it to solve real problems, and because of
that I veered off into science, into specifically psychiatry because it felt like a way where
I can take all these techniques I'd learned and use them to help measure something that
people were having trouble measuring. I was motivated to get into science because I feel
it's a very practical and effective field of study that you can use to help other people.
So even though for example I haven't been personally effected by a devastating mental
illness in my family, I mean the statistics on mental illness are horrendous enough that
makes it very motivating and inspiring to try to learn more about these diseases, and
how to measure then, and how to treat them. So life in the lab is actually very free spirited.
So when you are able to be in science, often times you're able to define your own problem,
and so you're able to say, "well this is something that I fell is high impact," and your able
to go ahead and work on it. So you can design your day, you can design who you work with.
For the most part you really get to have a lot of freedom in deciding how you are going
to work on this interesting problem and you just have to find a good way to assemble a
team of people around you who could help you and collaborate with you to try to get the
job done. So my end game is to help pharmaceutical companies design drugs to treat the negative
symptoms of schizophrenia. So things that reduce the desire of patients with schizophrenia
to go out and get a job, that makes, that make them draw themselves inward instead of
being able to go outward and express and communicate with the world. Those are the interventions
I want to help design. I would say that science is one of the best fields to be in if you're
naturally curious about the world. You really have to be very tenacious and to want to go
out and try to solve this thing that you think is very important that is going to help other
people. I feel that science is a very easy way to make the world a better place and there
are a lot of questions that need to be answered, and every single little answer that you can
give to a question to something, or discovery that could later help people down the road.