Undergraduate research offers students opportunities to gain real-world experience and provides researchers with additional staffing they need to complete their projects. Undergraduates are often the backbone of the research they are assigned, doing much of the routine day-to-day tasks necessary for the study's success. In return, they receive invaluable work experience and being involved in research early allows them to springboard into the field after graduation. 

The University of Arizona boasts countless opportunities to get involved in undergraduate research. Gavin Arnold, a Junior majoring in Biochemistry and minoring in both Neuroscience and Public Health, serves in multiple undergraduate research positions as he prepares for a career in medicine. 

“It is so valuable that there is a focus through RII on undergraduate research,” said Arnold. “There is so much investment in getting students involved. Coming in as someone who hasn't done research before, I felt supported enough to learn how to collaborate between labs, talk scientifically, and access the robust scientific community here.”

Arnold’s research interests include neurodegenerative diseases, cognitive impairment, and memory decline. “I wanted to go into these fields because the average age where I grew up was above 60 years old,” Arnold said. “I have a lot of firsthand experience with these individuals and the challenges they face in their day-to-day life.”

Arnold emphasized that in our lives, we will all go through some form of cognitive decline, which is why even small quality-of-life improvements for these people are so important. He wants to work to ensure that they can make the most out of those years. 

Arnold is an undergraduate research assistant at the BIO5 Institute, where he works under Ying-Hui Chou, director of the Brain Imaging & TMS Laboratory. Arnold’s project looks at a noninvasive tool called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which has already been FDA-approved for a variety of uses, including as a treatment for depression. TMS is a brain stimulation treatment that uses magnetic pulses to stimulate nerve cells in the brain. 

Chou’s team, including Arnold, is investigating TMS’s application in patients with a mid-range of cognition skills. They want to use TMS to create long-term effects in the brain that would improve the cognitive ability of patients. Currently, they are in the final phases of participant enrollment & administration and are hoping to publish their research soon. 

“It was a great study that gave us a lot of qualitative data,” Arnold said. “Patients have come back to us after they received TMS treatment and said that this tool helped them. We’re hoping we can take that feedback and affect the lives of patients everywhere.”

In addition to his work at BIO5, Arnold received an Honors exploratory mini-grant with two other undergraduate students, Catherine Jezerc and Kaitlyn Lai. The grant for $10,000 investigates the applicability of a second non-invasive tool alongside TMS called transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS). 

TaVNS stimulates the auricular branch of the vagus nerve through the ear using electrical stimulation. Arnold and his co-researchers aim to use taVNS prior to TMS to utilize neuroplasticity–the brain’s ability to adapt and form new memories–to make TMS results more consistent. Before they can test the efficacy on cognitively impaired individuals, they must prove it works in healthy adults. As such, their study employs the help of many student volunteers. 

Arnold’s time in undergraduate research has given him invaluable lifetime skills to prepare him for the future. “It has developed me into someone who feels comfortable in a research setting, from both the scientific and project management side of things,” Arnold said.

“In order to create researchers, you have to have a starting point, you have to understand how research works before being able to branch off and pursue your own projects,” Arnold said. “Starting with no experience and being able to join a lab and gain that experience firsthand, contributing to the research teaches students how to communicate and function in a lab setting.”

Undergraduate research is paramount to produce the scientists of tomorrow–the ones who can face grand challenges around the world.