Davis receives ‘golden ticket’ to continue research

Srah Davis (Class of 2012) had an interest in chemistry when she was a student at Hazel Park High School.

That interest will soon blossom into a career as a professor at a university.

Davis just received her “golden ticket” when she was awarded funding from the National Institute of Health.

“I’ll be doing research for three to five years in a lab and once it’s completed then I can become a professor,” Davis said. “This was a highly competitive pre-doctoral fellowship that had a very long application process. This will pay for the rest of my Ph.D.

Davis does neuroscience research, studying how HIV and methamphetamine together affect dopamine signaling in the brain.

“People are living longer now because we have better drugs to treat HIV so these drugs can’t enter the brain to clear the virus out of the brain,” Davis said “These HIV proteins build up and what happens is about 50 percent of the people living with HIV end up with these different neurocognitive impairments which cause symptoms like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and in the worst forms it becomes HIV associated dementia. This causes an inability to function in everyday life.

“Because of this, people who have HIV are much more susceptible to becoming addicted to methamphetamine,” Davis added. “We’re trying to understand why that is. We know some of the ways HIV messes with dopamine in the brain. We’ve known for a long time how meth messes with dopamine in the brain. We’re checking to see if there are separate mechanisms acting synergistically or additively and that’s why they’re more susceptible.”

Davis’ love for chemistry began in high school thanks to a former teacher, Ms. Zitzelberger.

She’s 100 percent why I studied chemistry and why I got interested in it,” Davis said. “She didn’t teach like normal teachers. She spoke like a professor, very energetic. She made complicated things seem rather easy to understand. After taking AP chem I told myself I needed to do something chemistry related. Chemical engineering sounded scary but biochemistry, that sounded like a fancy form of chemistry, so let’s see what that’s about.”

Davis graduated from the University of Michigan, where she also played clarinet in the marching band all four years, with a biochemistry degree. She then got her master’s degree from Grand Valley State University.

“Sarah was a reflective, talented and hard-working student,” Ms. Zitzelberger said. “Her Ph.D. represents her determination to expand human knowledge through rigorous application of scientific methodology.

“Hazel Park teachers have a deep personal commitment to preparing students for higher education, and Sarah’s success is proof that we are achieving our goal,” Zitzelberger continued. “Her perseverance through the long journey to a Ph.D is a testament to Sarah’s character, and I am grateful to be part of a profession that has allowed me to know her and other future scientists. Young women like Sarah are our best hope for the future.”

Upon receiving her master’s degree, she enrolled at the University of South Carolina where she began working on a chemistry tool that was used to measure dopamine in the brain. Her work was to make the tool better and more sensitive to measure dopamine in the brain.

But she truly wanted to use the tool to conduct her own research.

“I joined a lab there and was able to build the tool from the ground up,” Davis said. “That’s exactly what I wanted to do. I want to continue to study abused substances and try to develop pharmacotherapies for people because we don’t have a lot of good drugs to combat it. The most popular is Narcan for opioid overdoses but that’s the only good thing we have for substance abuse disorders.”

Davis added she also might want to “dip her toes” in Covid and how it affects the brain.

“Early studies show that dopamine signaling could be an issue with people that have the long Covid.”

After her fellowship, Davis, who recently gave birth to her and her husband’s first child, would like to work at a university in the Midwest where she can continue her work with neurotransmitter signaling, how your brain cells talk to each other.