Home Department: Symbolic Systems
Supported by: Anonymous Donor
Mentor: Russell Fernald, Biology

Katrina is working to gain a better understanding of the neurological basis of aggressive and reproductive social behaviors by applying computational methods and information theory to neuroethology (the study of animal brains and behavior). This work has potential implications for a variety of human disorders, from PTSD to social anxiety. Katrina is working with data collected from Astatatotilapia burtoni, a fish species with drastic phenotypic changes depending on its social environment, but the code they produce will hopefully allow data to be collected faster and analyzed more thoroughly in the future in a variety of animal models.

Poster presented at the Stanford Bio-X Interdisciplinary Initiatives Symposium on August 26, 2015:

Computational Analysis of Social Behavior in a Fish (Astatotilapia burtoni)

Katrina Kent¹, Austin Hilliard¹, Scott Juntti¹, Rosa Alcazar¹, Russell Fernald¹
[Department of Biology¹, Stanford University]