Little did Snchez Melndez know that his student experience at Iowa would alter his career trajectory. First, the professor in a pharmacology class he took his sophomore year encouraged him to consider PhD programs. Then, an email from Jan Wessels Cognitive Neurology Lab invited him to participate in a weeklong summer workshop on campus for first-generation students interested in human brain research. Not only did Snchez Melndez learn to apply the neuroscience techniques he was studying in his classes, he got to know several UI faculty members, including Kristi Hendrickson, the researcher with whom he has been working eversince.

About the same time, the Iowa Sciences Academy shared information with Snchez Melndez about how to earn compensation for lab work. Now, he is a trainee with UI-MARC (Maximizing Access to Research Careers), a National Institutes of Healthfunded program that aims to prepare a diverse pool of undergraduates for research-focused biomedicalcareers.

If you would have told me when I was a senior in high school that in my senior year of college I would get a stipend, health care, and other benefits to work in a lab that I enjoy, I would have said that was too good to be true, he says. I didnt even know that waspossible.

As an undergraduate research assistant in the UI Psycholinguistics Lab, Snchez Melndez has contributed to several projects that use cognitive neuroscience techniques to study language and communication. He also was encouraged to create a study of hisown.

In the lab, we work with language in general, trying to understand how different groups of people process words and sentences, he says. In one project, we are trying to find out if SpanishEnglish bilinguals, across their lifespan, activate their first language when they hear a word in their second languageand vice versa. And do they do that in both written and spoken forms? Gaining a better understanding of this will help speech-language pathologists in their clinicalwork.

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Learning to decode the brain - The University of Iowa