About Myself & This Website
Note
In progress! :)
I was born in Arizona to a family of Slovak immigrants, and grew up shaped by their tenacity and a deep appreciation for the natural world. Science wasn’t an obvious path for me at first, it certainly took some wandering around to find it. I stumbled into neuroscience while applying to university, drawn to it as a field that felt genuinely interdisciplinary: part empirical, part conceptual, never quite finished. Philosophy had been a longer interest, and discovering that I could pursue it seriously alongside neuroscience through ASU’s Philosophy of Science, Nature, and Mind program made everything click.
My undergraduate years were defined by that combination. I trained in the SOCIAL Neurobiology Lab under Dr. Jessica Verpeut, studying cerebellar circuits involved in social cognition and flexible behavior in rodent models. I completed an honors thesis examining the coordinated role of the hippocampus and cerebellum in spatial–social processing. In parallel, I worked as an Emergency Department Technician at Phoenix Children’s Hospital. It was there, in the middle of patient care, that medicine crystallized for me as a calling. From a philosophical standpoint, I think medicine is one of the deepest expressions of human love: the attempt to understand, connect with, and heal your fellow human beings.
I’m now a Master of Science student in Cognitive Science at Umeå University, where I’m affiliated with the Physiology of Cortical Microcircuits Lab under Dr. Paolo Medini. My current work extends a sensory gating paradigm to investigate the temporal dynamics of cortical inhibition, with implications for schizophrenia and neurodevelopmental conditions like ASD. I’m particularly drawn to the developmental thread, trying to poke and prod at how sensory gating matures across the lifespan and what its disruption can tell us about the origins of psychiatric illness.
This site is a personal wiki of sorts: a place for my CV, notes, and whatever else seems worth writing down. I’m glad you’re here!
For what I’m up to right now, see Now. To get in touch, head to Contact.