Science project for high school student

Science education starts early these days. When I was starting working in neuroscience back in 2008, modeling of single neurons using Hodgkin-Huxley equations was probably the hardest thing to be done. At that time I was using the Object Pascal to program the equations and create the user interface to track the results. It took about a few months at that time to make things organized. These days the technology allows to do the same things in Python at much faster pace, so even high school students could learn how to do it!
It was a great pleasure to supervise Sasha Batoukova in her computational neuroscience project. You could find her presentation here. After 3 months working on simulating neurons, she extended our work with Costas Anastassiou on modeling of human neurons in the context of epilepsy. She performed a lot of simulations on single cell and neural network level and predicted ion channel perturbations that could be used to control seizures. Thanks to detailed documentation of BMTK simulator, it is very easy to set up simulations. So the researchers like Sasha could concentrate on the research questions rather than the details of the implementations of the highly sophisticated simulations.
I am personally very happy for Sasha and her ability to navigate the complex datasets from Allen Institute and develop her own scientific reasoning. I hope things would keep going well for her in the further steps of her career development in the STEM field.
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