Meet Samantha Hall, a postgraduate researcher in the Horvath Lab
Samantha Hall has always been a mathematician. Now, as a postgraduate researcher in the Horvath lab, she’s learning how to be a neuroscientist. Hall recently won the Department of Comparative Medicine’s inaugural DEI Postgrad Award to fund her training.
Before Yale, Hall had never mixed chemicals. She was used to coding simulations on her computer and writing math proofs. At Bryn Mawr College, she studied mathematics, and completed her undergraduate thesis in computational biology. She continued this research for her masters of systems engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania, with a specific focus on COVID-19. “Math is like the language of science,” Hall said.
She wondered how she could apply her understanding forward to the brain.
Hall’s decision to switch to neuroscience was deeply personal. She wanted to be able to study anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder that has affected her, her mother, and all her mother’s siblings. “I know a freakish amount about the disease,” Hall said. “I struggled for 15 years. I might as well try to help people.”
In her application to Yale’s neuroscience PhD program, she specifically referenced a paper by Marcelo Dietrich, MD, PhD, an associate professor in comparative medicine, and Tamas Horvath, DVM, PhD, the Jean and David W. Wallace Professor of Comparative Medicine. Though she was not offered admission to the graduate school, Dietrich saw potential in her. Seeing Hall had no experience in neuroscience, he offered her a chance to train in his lab as a postgraduate researcher.
Hall started in Dietrich’s lab in the summer of 2022, before switching into the Horvath lab earlier this year to focus more on anorexia. Her current project involves a mice model of activity-based anorexia, which she uses to test the impact of different therapeutic approaches. Motivated by her own dissatisfaction with current treatments for anorexia, Hall is eager to find better interventions for eating habits and compulsive behaviors associated with the condition.
“I've gone to rehabilitation centers, and it's not up to par,” Hall said. “A lot of people don't get the care that they need. So not only do I know the neurological and behavioral side, but I also know that from a clinical treatment side, needs are not being met. So, I would love to bridge that gap.”
Based on her own lived experience, Hall can usually predict the mice’s behavior. For example, she found that by restricting the mice’s food, they engage more in compulsive exercise such as running. “It's really distressing because these behaviors seem so counterintuitive to survival,” Hall said. She thought back to her own anorexia diagnosis at age 10. At that age, she did not know what a “size two” was, she said. She had no influence from the media. “It was internally driven and I didn’t know what drove it.” Going forward in her research career, Hall wants to know what differences in the brain could explain these behaviors.
Hall is particularly interested in anorexia’s comorbidity with obsessive compulsive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder — all conditions she has experience with. She believes her answers could lie in the hypothalamus and amygdala. With these research queries and new experience in neuroscience under her belt, she is reapplying to PhD programs in computational neuroscience this cycle.
Hall expressed gratitude for the DEI Postgrad Award for recognizing the value of her postgrad research and lived experiences. “Though I have a disability, I'm still really competent,” Hall said. She reflected on interactions where people talked down to her because of her disability. She thought back to doctors who told her she might not be able to recover.
“To win this award, and to go to Yale was like, ‘Haha,’” Hall said. “This really motivates me to help people and to recover.”