Seniors Freeman and Thé Awarded NSF Fellowships

by Stacey Kutish
04/16/2008

Jeremy Freeman and Lydia Thé photo by Matt Powell

Freeman is an honors special major in neuroscience, combining neurobiology, cognitive psychology, mathematical statistics, and independent neuroscience research in his studies. He studies motion perception with Swarthmore Professor of psychology, Frank Durgin. Freeman has also done extensive research at the N.Y.U. Center for Neural Science with Professors Denis Pelli and David Heeger. His research has focused on understanding how objects are represented in the brain. Most recently, Freeman has used fMRI to measure interactions between different brain regions during object recognition, and to show how these interactions encode object information. Last year, Freeman received a Goldwater Scholarship. He plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Neural Science at New York University this fall.

Thé started doing science research in high school at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine through a New York Academy of Sciences program. As a biology major at Swarthmore, she has worked with Professor Elizabeth Vallen, studying the role of the myosin protein in yeast cell division. She has also studied germline development in the worm, C. elegans, with Geraldine Seydoux at Johns Hopkins Medicine. She presented her findings at the 2007 International C. elegans Meeting in Los Angeles. This fall, she will join the Molecular and Cell Biology Graduate Program at the University of California at Berkeley.