Xana Waughman

Howdy! My name is Xana Dias-Waughman and I am a born-and-raised Seattleite enjoying the sunny weather of Tucson as I pursue an MD-PhD. I was drawn to neuroscience and medicine as an adolescent watching my grandmother recover from an ischemic stroke. I'm fascinated by the connection between the vascular, neural and immune system in the brain. How do complications in one system cause downstream dysregulation in another? So cool! 

As an undergraduate I worked in the laboratory of Dr. Janet Finlay performing behavioral testing on the Htt/Q11 Huntington's Disease mouse model using the Five-choice serial-reaction time task. Our goal was to assess whether Htt/Q11 was a "valid" model- that is, had a behavioral and biochemical phenotype similar to that of Huntington's in humans. During my last year, I participated in the Undergraduate Internship in Neurosurgery through the Cascade Brain and Spine Center in Bellingham, WA. This internship gave me the opportunity to shadow a practice of neurosurgeons for 200 hours, observing diagnosis, treatment, follow-up and operative care of patients. These experiences were both incredibly rewarding and left me in a deep existential crisis- did I want to become a scientist, or a doctor? It was at this point that my advisor introduced me to the idea of becoming BOTH! 

Following graduation, I moved to the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle where I worked for four years in the optical physiology lab performing in vivo two-photon calcium imaging in the visual cortex of awake and behaving mice. The broad goal of this project was to understand how the brain stores, encodes and processes visual information. I worked with many driven, passionate and sharp neuroscience faculty during my time at the Allen- including, but not limited to, Dr.'s Saskia de Vries, Jerome Lecoq and Peter Groblewski. With their guidance and mentorship, I pursued the MD/PhD route and Tucson. 

I am so excited to be a part of the MSTP program in Tucson and am looking forward to expanding my knowledge of all facets of medicine and research during the next 7 years. Perhaps even more critically, I am excited to be exposed to consistent sunshine for the first time in my life!