Marshall Sherfield Fellow Laura earned her Bachelors degree in Chemistry at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she first became fascinated by research when she was able to make bacteria glow through exposure to mercury. She then traveled to Missouri to complete a combined MD/PhD program at Saint Louis University, with research in neuropharmacology. For the last several years she has been performing a clinical residency and fellowship in Pediatric Neurology at Washington University in St Louis. She plans to spend the coming year at University College London, utilising electrophysiological techniques to investigate alterations in neuronal signaling which underlie human diseases such as epilepsy.