Bianca Leonard

Bianca Leonard

About Me
Projects
Research Interests
Publications
Fun!
I am a first-year PhD student in the Medical Scientist Training Program (MD/PhD), where I have completed my first and second years of medical school. I am a yinzer from the city of Pittsburgh, where I completed my B.S. in Neuroscience with minors in Chemistry and Spanish at the University of Pittsburgh. I spent a gap year as a Research Assistant in the Rossi Lab at Pitt where I studied traumatic brain injury and oculomotor function before I moved across the country to begin graduate school at UCI. I am also a student in the Program in Medical Education for the Latino Community (PRIME-LC) through the medical school where I am educated about the various obstacles our patients face and how to address them. This was largely influenced by my upbringing in a Honduran-American family. I am passionate about asking neuroscience questions and considering the direct impact their answers will have on my future patients. It is important to me that everyone has access to equitable healthcare, and I aspire to include compassion in everything I do. I hope to leverage research on the impact of pre- and postnatal conditions on neurodevelopment to emphasize the consequences that marginalization and adversity have on our communities.

I am interested in how early life adversity and prenatal conditions affect neurodevelopment. As the socioeconomic divide continues to grow, the marginalization of many populations continues to negatively impact health outcomes. I would like to learn how models of early life adversity and stress alter memory, emotional, and cognitive functioning, and I am interested in identifying which factors have the greatest consequence on those processes. I will be using the rich Conte Center dataset to investigate questions shaped by my understanding of neuroscience, neurodevelopment, and public health.

Granger, C.E., Yang, Q., Song, H., Saito, K., Nozato, K., Latchney, L.R., Leonard, B.T., Chung, M. M., Williams, D.R., Rossi, E.A.; Human Retinal Pigment Epithelium: In Vivo Cell Morphometry, Multispectral Autofluorescence, and Relationship to Cone Mosaic. Invest. Ophthalmol. Vis. Sci. 2018;59(15):5705-5716. doi: 10.1167/iovs.18-24677.

Van der Merwe, Y., Faust, A. E., Conner, I., Gu, X., Feturi, F., Zhao, W., Leonard, B., Roy, S., Gorantla, V. S., Venkataramanan, R.,Washington, K. M., Wagner, W. R., and Steketee, M. B. (2017). An Elastomeric Polymer Matrix, PEUU-Tac, Delivers Bioactive Tacrolimus Transdurally to the CNS in Rat. EBioMedicine, 26, 47-59.

I love to go salsa dancing (not very good at it yet), practice yoga, roller skate (I’m a novice), cook, (learning to) run, and play around with interior design/DIY projects. I have 2 cats, Remy and Alma, and a partner, Logan. A perfect night is when we all plop on the couch and watch(critique) movies!