Ramla Abdi is looking forward to combining her interdisciplinary goals in the NAD PhD programme.
Ramla Abdi has always been interested in how humans think and behave:
“When I was in high school, I was quite curious about human behaviour and thought and so I took psychology because it seemed like the best way to understand that. I found it fascinating, but with time, I was becoming more and more interested in the underlying neuronal processes. I remember having a conversation with my psychology teacher in high school who suggested that maybe I should go into neuroscience instead,” Ramla explains.
Since then, Ramla has pursued her interest in neuroscience, completing her bachelor’s degree abroad in Scotland before doing her master’s degree in Neuroscience at the University of Copenhagen. She has also held student research and research assistant positions, providing her with solid research experience, and she hopes to refine her goals during the NAD pre-PhD year:
”My neuroscience experience has been shaped by a desire to explore a variety of methods to find the best fit for my research interests which stems from an intrinsic drive to understand the brain's fundamental unit – neurons. So far, I have had experience in working with different disease types, from multiple sclerosis to Alzheimer’s disease and ALS and I am particularly fascinated by the mechanisms in which these diseases impair neurons. In the rotations, I still want to stick with doing something related to neurodegenerative diseases, but I also want to explore. Since I have interests within computational neuroscience and molecular neuroscience, I want to use this opportunity to mix and match as combining the two can be a bit tricky,” Ramla says.
Shaping an interdisciplinary PhD project requires collaboration between groups, and Ramla hopes to be able to establish relevant connections through the lab rotations:
”Trying to foster collaborations with different people is not as easy as it sounds, but I think it becomes easier in the NAD PhD programme because it supports me in setting up collaborations between different research groups,” Ramla explains.