CSETAC would like to recognize some of the student presentation winners from our 2023 Annual Meeting in Charleston, South Carolina. Bridget Knapp is a masters student at NC State and was awarded 1st place Graduate Student Poster Presentation. Below, Bridget shares about her research and passions in science.
Bridget Knapp is an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) Research Fellow at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Dr. Stephanie Padilla’s lab, working on testing chemicals for possible developmental neurotoxicity using a zebrafish model. Her research focuses on identifying negative control chemicals for her lab’s larval zebrafish screening assay, which measures zebrafish locomotor behavior in response to visual stimuli. There are established positive control chemicals, but identification of negative control
chemicals is lacking. This work will allow researchers to measure the sensitivity and specificity of similar assays.
Additionally, she is working on a project with Dr. Richard Judson to uncover the specific mechanisms responsible for causing zebrafish embryo toxicity using high-throughput transcriptomic analysis.
Through her experience as a researcher, she decided to pursue a career in statistics because she wants to help people design their experiments and understand their data. She graduated from the Applied Statistics and Data Management Graduate Certificate program at NC State in August 2023, and she is planning on graduating with her master’s degree in statistics from NC State in December 2024.
She had a great time sharing her research at the annual meeting of the Carolinas Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry in April 2023. She wishes to thank the organizers for this opportunity.