Mary Blendermann
She/Her
I am a lesbian and I am a clinical neuroscience lab manager.//
I’ve always associated science with being queer – I followed one of the few queer women at my tiny, conservative college into a psychology major and never looked back. Currently, I manage a clinical neuroscience lab at the University of California at Davis, where I study cognitive control of emotion in people with schizophrenia. Once I get to grad school, I’d like to research the relationship between traumatic experiences, emotion regulation, and psychopathology. In other words: when something really stressful or scary happens to you, why does that make it hard to control how you feel, and how is that related to whether you experience mental health problems later? My current PI is queer too (*waves at Dr. Laura Tully*) and her mentoring has enabled me to be confidently out in the professional sphere – I keep a rainbow flag at my desk, I always have a queer book to recommend, and I regularly start discussions around the lab about the intersections of diverse identities and clinical research. (I also get asked a lot to catch insects and take them outside, but that’s probably not related to me being gay…right?)