PhD student
email: pooja.mahendran@durham.ac.uk
Pooja completed an MSc in Neuroscience at King’s College London. While there, she completed a six-month project investigating potential genetic regulators of programmed cell death occurring within the ventral nerve cords of Drosophila melanogaster during the L3 stage. During this time, she developed a strong interest in insect neuroscience. After her master’s, she joined a lab at Queen Mary for two months to work on a project looking at whether crickets have sentience. She performed behavioural experiments to investigate the effect that painkillers had on the crickets’ response to painful stimuli. Now she is currently pursuing a PhD under the IAPETUS2 DTP Studentship to investigate the evolution of bumblebee brains by comparing the anatomy of brains from different species. The project will also be investigating the degree of plasticity their brains have and which factors may affect it, such as flower diversity and climate.