Dua's Project Page

Who:  Hi! My name is Dua, and I am from Draper, Utah. I committed to the University of Utah to continue the wonderful science endeavors I had as a local Utahn, along with just being able to connect and be a part of this amazing science community, such as ACCESS. If I’m not doing science, I enjoy creative direction and may be found filming and editing videos, or shooting and editing portrait and conceptual photography.

My scientific interests:  As a child, I loved puzzles, and during my sophomore year of high school, I realized that one of the biggest puzzles today is the human brain. This sparked my interest in neuroscience, eventually leading me to aiding in neuroscience research while in high school. From my involvement, I knew that I wanted to continue broadening my scope of the brain on the physiological level to not only understand it, but to also understand us.

Academic goals:  As a pre-med Honors Physics major with a minor in Chemistry, I hope to continue with my ACCESS lab to tie in neuroscience research with biophysics, expanding knowledge on the sensory system in relation to higher-level processing while incorporating biophysics approaches and methods. Later on, I plan to further my research and education by attending medical school in the MD/PhD program, in order to utilize my research for medical care and treatment.

Career goals:  I hope to provide medical care to those in need here while also conducting medical research in neurological treatment. While doing that, I hope to ask and answer more questions in regard to the human brain, unlocking more of what we don’t understand about what’s inside our heads.

Varying brain sizes across species is one of the many aspects of brain evolution, presenting the question of whether increases in brain size yield an expansion of cognitive and behavioral capacities. We are interested in determining if the variation in brain size across the Drosophila  phylogeny is due to changes in neuron number. We begin to answer this question by examining the well-defined olfactory circuit, specifically by quantifying the olfactory sensory neurons in the antenna of two species: D. melanogaster  and D. pseudoobscura .  Using techniques such as immunohistochemistry, confocal microscopy, and novel computational approaches for quantification, we expect to see an increased number of olfactory sensory neurons in D. pseudoobscura , the species with the larger brain. The results obtained will aid in highlighting the significance of processing powers in relation to brain size.

Dua Azhar Research Poster.pdf Download Dua Azhar Research Poster.pdf