From Molecules to Stress Responses with Kejia Zhang

Hi everyone! My name is Kejia Zhang, and I’m a senior at UNC Chapel Hill majoring in Neuroscience with a minor in Chemistry.

My curiosity about the mind started long before I knew what neuroscience was. Growing up between Russia and China, I was surrounded by multiple languages and cultural contexts, and I became sensitive to how people change the way they speak depending on who they are with and what they have lived through. Language felt less like a fixed system and more like something shaped by experience. Over time, that awareness grew into a deeper question for me: how do internal states like stress, memory, and mood influence the way we understand and respond to the world around us?

I’ve been trying to approach that question from multiple angles. I started with molecular neuroscience, working under the mentorship of Dr. Shveta Parekh to study how acute MDMA exposure affects leptin gene expression in the amygdala and dorsal hippocampus using RT-qPCR. The bench taught me patience, troubleshooting, and how much care goes into making data trustworthy. But it also clarified something important for me: even when molecular changes are real, they rarely capture the full complexity of mental states or psychiatric vulnerability on their own.

Wanting to zoom out, I pursued circuit-level research during a summer program at the Chinese Academy of Sciences with Dr. Jun Yan, using AI-assisted reconstruction tools to trace and curate single-neuron morphologies from large-scale imaging datasets. That experience strengthened my spatial reasoning and data-quality instincts, and it reinforced a critical insight: even with precise structural information, function emerges through coordinated interactions across networks, unfolding over time. I later explored cognition and behavior more directly in Dr. Jennifer Arnold’s Psycholinguistics Lab, assisting with experiments on pronoun production and priming and observing how context can systematically shift what people produce in language. Across these experiences, the theme that kept pulling me forward was the same—internal state matters, and understanding it requires seeing the brain as a dynamic system shaped by biology, environment, and development.

That is why I was excited to be placed through the Gil Internship Program at the Neurocognition and Imaging Research Lab (NIRL), directed by Dr. Aysenil Belger. The lab’s work focuses on how attention, stress, and information processing are supported by neural systems in the developing brain, and how these systems may diverge in neuropsychiatric and neurodevelopmental conditions. A major emphasis is adolescence, a critical window when stress- and emotion-regulation systems are still maturing and when early vulnerability can begin to emerge. The lab is organized around large, longitudinal studies—including PASS (Pathways to Adolescent Success Study) and STAARS (Stress Trajectories and Anhedonia in Adolescence Research Study)—that integrate behavioral tasks, neuroimaging, physiological stress measures, and clinical assessments. Even at the start of the semester, it’s clear that this kind of work depends on careful coordination, standardization, and collaboration across many roles.

At this early stage, I’m still beginning my internship and learning the lab’s workflows, but I already have a clear sense of my responsibilities and how they support the broader mission. My primary role involves supporting stress and physiology data collection, including serving as a panelist for the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) and assisting with heart-rate monitoring to capture acute stress responses in real time. I will also assist with the creation and implementation of neurocognitive and affective stimuli used in experimental tasks, support MRI and EEG data collection, and contribute to data organization and management. Together, these responsibilities help ensure that multimodal data collected across participants and time points remains consistent, interpretable, and meaningful.

What excites me most right now is the opportunity to learn how stress becomes measurable—how subjective experience is translated into physiological signals, and how small details in protocol and timing can shape the data that ultimately informs our understanding of risk and resilience. Being part of this process has already shifted how I think about research, not as a single moment of analysis, but as a careful chain of decisions that begins long before results appear.

I’m deeply grateful to Dr. Aysenil Belger for her mentorship and guidance, and to the Gil Internship coordinators Dr. Steven Buzinski and Richie Gray for creating such a wonderful space where we can explore interests through real work and real responsibility. I’m looking forward to growing into this role over the course of the semester and continuing to connect the question that first drew me in—how internal states shape our lives—to the tools that help us study them.