Georgetown College. Georgetown University.

Dr. Neale encouraged Victoria Rafalski to pursue her research interests at the graduate school level. She is currently at Stanford University. (Courtesy Victoria Rafalski)

By Dayo Akinwande

The word “mentor” is particularly imprinted in the mind of Victoria Rafalski, now a third-year doctorate student at Stanford University, when talking about Dr. Joe Neale. Lured to Georgetown University by its location in “cosmopolitan” Washington, D.C., and the solid liberal arts education she could receive while studying biology, Rafalski began working in Dr. Neale’s lab the summer after her freshman year as part of the Georgetown-Hughes Undergraduate Research Scholars program.

“From my early interactions with Dr. Neale, I got the impression that he was a wonderful mentor to undergraduates,” says Rafalski. “Dr. Neale is enthusiastic, caring, and smart and encourages his students to achieve their best. I was also drawn to work with him because his lab was made up of a great group of people that made working there fun and lively.”

Rafalski also possessed a strong interest in studying molecular neurobiology, and working in Dr. Neale’s lab gave her the opportunity to work on the neurotransmitter N-acetylaspartylglutamate (NAAG), about which she became an author of a lab-published paper.

“I was excited about NAAG because it had great potential for a host of therapeutic applications, including treatment of stroke, schizophrenia, and diabetic neuropathy,” says Rafalski. “It is an example of how basic research should be funded by the government because it can eventually contribute to development of medicines.”

Rafalski’s lab tenure, which continued for the rest of her undergraduate years at Georgetown, immensely improved her critical thinking and science-writing skills—virtues that have served her well in Dr. Anne Brunet’s lab at Stanford University, studying the molecular basis of longevity and age-related diseases. Rafalski’s growth as a thinker and writer of the sciences is microcosmic of her learning experiences as a molecular neurobiology student. She aspires to be the director of a lab that answers critical questions about the nervous system, and she credits her studies at Georgetown for such a career goal.

“My experience doing research with Dr. Neale as part of the Howard Hughes program gave me the opportunity to realize I was fascinated by the details of brain function,” she says.

Hailing from Wilmington, Delaware, Rafalski graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in biology from Georgetown in 2005. She was also a member of the Sigma Xi society and the Phi Beta Kappa society, won the Barry Goldwater Scholarship, and was a John Carroll scholar. As a graduate student at Stanford, she received the National Science Foundation Scholarship and a Stanford Graduate Fellowship, and she is a student representative for the Stanford neurosciences Ph.D. program.

Print Article