Pelin Avcu, PhD
I received my Ph.D in Neuroscience from Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences in 2015, under the mentorship of Dr Richard Servatius and co-mentorship of Dr Kevin Pang. My dissertation focused on the effects of mild traumatic brain injuries (mTBI) on stress coping (instrumental Escape/Avoidance conditioning), associative learning (Classical Eyeblink conditioning) and defensive reflexes (Acoustic startle responses).
Upon graduation, I continued working with Dr Kevin Pang as a postdoctoral trainee, and investigated hedonic and motivational value of positive and negative reinforcement after mTBI in rats. In 2017, I started my postdoctoral training with Dr Antje Ihlefeld at NJIT. My current research interest is to understand the effects of early life auditory deprivation on central auditory processing through electrophysicological recordings from awake behaving gerbils.