Caitlin Bannister

Caitlin is the first Behavioral Neuroscience student at Western to receive a Goldwater scholarship. After graduating high school, Bannister was a full-time caregiver for a decade before returning to her studies, ultimately deciding on neuroscience instead of nursing so she could study neurogenerative diseases and work towards treatments and cures so that less people needed caregiving. Her research at Western is in collaboration with her mentors Kameron Harris, Jeff Carrol, and Jeff Cantle. Besides her behavioral neuroscience major, Bannister is a student in the Honors Program, the on-campus coordinator for the Neuroscience Research-Driven Students (NeRDS) club, the secretary for Psi Chi (the International Psychology Honors Society), and is double minoring in political science and economics. After graduating, Bannister intends to obtain her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Brown through the National Institutes of Health’s Graduate Partnerships Program and conduct research in nervous system repair and/or neurogenesis mechanisms with the goal of developing treatments for damaged and dysfunctional nervous systems.