Stephen Benesh

Research Assistant, University of Alabama at Birmingham.

Stephen Benesh graduated with a Bachelor’s Degree in History from Davidson College in 2009. He is applying to medical school with the hopes of joining the 2010 entering class. He was hired in June by Dr. Robert McCullumsmith as a research technician until he returns to school. He previously worked in the Meador-Woodruff Laboratory during the summer of 2007 as an undergraduate assisting Deborah Bauer with her characterization of Excitatory Amino Acid Transporter interacting proteins and preparing for a series of in situ hybridization experiments analyzing transcript expression in the thalamus. In the lab currently, Stephen assists Dr. McCullumsmith with his investigation into the role of glutamate transporter abnormalities in Schizophrenia. Specifically, he is working on developing a method of measuring glutamate uptake in brain slices and examining the relative transcript expression levels of glutamate transporter slice variants.