Amita was the first PhD student to join the lab. She reached out to me in Fall 2020, and was supposed to start in Fall 2021. Well, we all know that was a tough time to get much going nonetheless move halfway across the world from India. Nevertheless, Amita prevailed. She fought through visa issues with closed consulates, and was finally able to get to the US to start in Spring 2021. Meanwhile, since she was my first student, she participated in several zoom calls and started reading background literature with some material I sent her in India.

Amita’s story is one of resilience. She has always worked hard on her projects and was also the first student to publish a paper with me out of our independent lab. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/integrative-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnint.2021.803483/full. This paper was the first to characterize a physiological measure of binaural hearing in a mouse model of autism, Fragile X Syndrome (FXS). This also became the basis of Amita’s dissertation work where she continued with experiments to define when during development hearing issues arise in FXS and what anatomical markers might define these issues. I’m so proud of her achievements and I know she will be successful in whatever she does next. I am so excited to have her continue around until the end of December so that we can continue on getting some more of her work published and her continued mentorship of undergraduates in the lab.

That said, Amita has pushed herself to really take on the ethos of inclusive undergraduate mentorship that our lab strives to achieve. She has mentored several students with the utmost patience, training them in lab skills and taking on a course that was focused on undergraduate lab mentorship for a semester. She has also grown in her presentation skills and teaching throughout her tenure as a PhD student – she is nowhere near the person she was when she arrived and will continue to grow and learn new things as we all do as scientists.