McNair Scholar 2024 - Dorothea H. Tse
Dorothea H. Tse is a senior at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, majoring in psychology with a minor in integrative neuroscience. Her research interests include understanding the relationship between the glymphatic system and neurological diseases including Alzheimer’s disease and migraine. Dorothea plans to pursue a Ph.D. in Neuroscience.
Quote from Dorothea Tse
My dream is to use my knowledge and training to benefit people with exceptionalities. I hope to use science as a bridge to foster communication between scholars across the world to promote medical advancement.
Research project
Uncovering Mechanisms of Neurodegenerative Diseases by Measuring Cerebrospinal Fluid Flow in Mice
Abstract
The discovery of the glymphatic system in 2012 has revolutionized our understanding of the metabolic waste removal process in the brain. The glymphatic system involves flow of cerebrospinal fluid through the brain to remove waste molecules. Rapidly growing research on the glymphatic system reveals how its dysfunction acts on neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease. However, the driving mechanism of the glymphatic system is still poorly understood because of the complexity of performing in vivo quantitative measurements to accurately characterize CSF flow. This study employs surgical methods and two-photon microscopy to collect in-vivo videos of fluorescent microspheres flowing in CSF. Data analysis is conducted by performing particle tracking velocimetry to compare mean particle flow speeds between mice of different ages. Prior studies demonstrate that glymphatic transport decreases with age, but our preliminary results suggest there is no significant difference in mean flow speed between young and old mice.
Faculty mentor
Dr. Jeff Tithof is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering in the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Minnesota. Dr. Tithof received his Ph.D. in Physics from Georgia Institute of Technology in 2016, then worked as a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Rochester until joining UMN in 2020. His research specializes in biological fluid dynamics, with an emphasis on in vivo mouse experiments and numerical modeling that probe the glymphatic system.