Люди добрые, пожалуйста, покритикуйте и дайте советов, сам я не справляюсь
As a Medical University student, particularly interested in psychiatry, I have gained a robust understanding of major syndromes of mental disorders. I also have learned about physiology of the brain, psychopharmacology and clinical pathology. Throughout my training I visited meetings of student psychiatric society, dedicated to presentation of patients and extensive clinical practice in psychiatry. But the more patients I saw, the more I realized that, apart from the work of neurotrasmitters, we basically know nothing about how brain and mind start working incorrectly, and have no diagnostic tools to detect the disease and confirm diagnosis.
My area of interest changed after the lecture of Professor XXX on the question of how brain serves as a basis for higher psychic functions such as memory and cognition. After this lecture it became clear to me that not only we know very little about diseased brain and ill mind, we don't know very much about healthy brain and mind to start with. And to truly understand pathology of mental illnesses, the normal functioning of mind and its biological basis should be understood first.
In December 2013 I started my research in the group of Professor XXX, Moscow, Russia. At first I helped PhD students to conduct experiments on their projects: ran behavioral tests on mice, made surgical implantations of cranial windows, dissected mice, performed immunohistochemistry and imaged brain slices under confocal microscope. I also participated as research assistant in project focused on functional and molecular phenotype of neurons in cortical circuits. At the same time I read a lot of articles, attended laboratory seminars and journal clubs, and got a clearer idea what interests me. How does neuron “know” when and where to modify synapses to encode new memories? My ideas crystallized into my own project. It addressed to a specific question whether number of dendritic spines is changed in cells expressing immediate early genes after learning. It is largely assumed that dendritic spines provide anatomical substrate for memory and expression of immediate early genes is associated with neuronal plasticity, but it have never been shown that dendritic spines plasticity occurs in that same neurons. To address this question we used transgenic THY1-GFP mice, in which green fluorescent protein (GFP) is expressed on the surface of pyramidal neurons, so we could detect colocalization of GFP with immunohistochemically stained immediate early genes, count spines and compare its density with that of non-colocolized neurons. The results of this project were presented at several conferences and were awarded with the prize for best oral presentation on neurosciences subsection on International Conference for Students and Young Scientists "Lomonosov-2015"
It turned out that I love to work in the lab. From finding the right question and designing experiments to conducting them and analysing the results, it’s ultimately exciting. Even mundane benchwork is delightful for me. Working with mice and solutions, running immunohistochemistry, making microscopic images and analyzing them - that is my everyday routine and I happy to have it.
Now my research interests lay primarily on questions how brain circuits subserve behaviors and adapting of such behavior in learning.
[here goes variable part about interesting professors]
Мне кажется, что все-таки очень коротко вышло, или норм? Что еще можно было бы добавить, если нужно? Что исправить?