Dr. Barbara Clancy, from the Department of Biology, and students Brian Bowden and Kate Street recently received a $2,650 grant from the State Undergraduate Research Fellowship to study the effects of adverse neonatal experience on cortical neurons.
Several other UCA students and Dr. K.S. Anand from the Arkansas Children?s Research Institute will be involved with the study which seeks to better understand how pain and/or anesthesia in newborns might affect the way the brain develops.
Clancy said, ?We propose to analyze the behavior of rodents that have undergone painful neonatal experience with and without anesthetic drugs, and the structure of the brains of the same animals. Using these data, we will begin to understand how cortical disruption may be associated with developmental disorders often seen in ex-preterm children.?