It’s Mice to Meet You, Ellie!

An Honors Student’s Research History

by LeeAnn Mills

In a sterile lab coat and gloves with her hair tied tightly back, Ellie Wojcikowski transfers a mouse to a mechanized box for an experiment. Her training does not include surgeries on mice and rats — yet.

Growing up outside of Chicago, Wojcikowski came to the University of Iowa knowing she wanted to get involved with the community during her undergraduate years. Her mother introduced her to volunteering at nonprofits from a very young age. Now in the third year of her studies, Wojcikowski volunteers at the Iowa Farm Sanctuary.

“It has nothing to do with service necessarily,” she said. “It’s more of another version of getting involved and meeting people.”

Alongside volunteering, Wojcikowski is involved in the UI Honors Program community as a peer mentor and resident assistant. Though not specifically within the honors community, Wojcikowski often wears gloves and a lab coat as she does different types of research every semester.

In the past, she has worked on:

• Geo coding — transforming a description of a place to a point on a map
• Green space exposure — tracking the rate at which humans in certain areas are exposed to nature and how this affects them
• Respiration data — a variety of numerical charts pertaining to data collected from people’s lungs

Wojcikowski is now working on heart rate variability and its effect within the psychosis spectrum, a range of mental health conditions where the main one is hallucinations or delusions. She works with her mentor, Amanda McCleery, in the Mechanism of Adult and Psychopathology lab, or MAYPL.

“[Wojcikowski] is a superb lab citizen who is highly regarded by her peers, the research staff, and graduate trainees in the lab,” McCleery said. “I feel extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to mentor Ellie … [She’s been] an extremely promising junior researcher.”

McCleery even wrote Wojcikowski a letter of recommendation to use in her application for the Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award, which Wojcikowski received. The award provided her $1,000 dollars for travel and a research fellowship of her choosing.

Wojcikowski is uncertain about her future career, but she thinks she may become a clinician. Currently, she is not dead set on a specific graduate school, but the UI is on her list. Wojcikowski is mostly looking for a graduate school that is pro translational research. 

“If I’m going to be doing mouse work, I want to know it’s going to apply to people,” she said. “In the future, I want my research to be clinically relevant.” 

Currently, Wojcikowski is working on developing her own study that will take place in collaboration with the Parker Lab. She wants to study mice with a certain gene duplication or deletion that mimics traits like Schizophrenia and manipulate the activity of the cerebellum to determine if this has any effect on the condition.

Wojcikowski’s passion for research drives her to continue her education and discover new things every day. She loves how research is always evolving and changing.

“I like that change offers a chance for me to learn,” Wojcikowski said.