Danielle Stolzenberg
Name: Danielle Stolzenberg, PhD
Age: 28
Location: Charlottesville, VA
Occupation: Postdoctoral Fellow
Having a Ph.D. isn’t enough to secure a job these days, especially if you’re a scientist. That’s why Danielle Stolzenberg is dedicating nearly four years of her life to an academic residency known as a postdoctoral position. Danielle studies the neurobiology of maternal behavior, which is a fancy way of saying that she tries to figure out how and why mothers respond to their infants’ stimuli. Last year she graduated with a Ph.D. in behavioral neuroscience from Boston College, but it’s not as if this Cool Girl was a scientist from birth.
Growing up in Pembroke Pines, Florida, Danielle wasn’t sure what she wanted to be when she grew up, but she knew she hated the science fair and lima beans. “I wasn’t particularly good at science, and I definitely wasn’t a fan of it,” she says. This is a huge difference from the girl who, during the first week of her “Physiological Psychology” class in college, went to the registrar and changed her major and degree from a BA to a BS in order to pursue a degree in Behavioral Neuroscience. “Physiological Psychology was rumored to be the most difficult of all the psychology classes, and even though I had never been a straight A student up till that point, from the day I stepped foot in that class everything changed. I got it on a level that seemed to make everything else make sense,” she remembers. She was hooked. As Danielle puts it, “Neuroscience was like the “gateway drug” for me.”
A career in neuroscience is hard, as there’s rarely enough time for Dr. Stolzenberg to get to everything she’d like to take on. But all and all, it’s worth it. “When it seems impossible, I try not to let myself forget that I have an opportunity here to be the one on the frontier of human knowledge. The research that I publish might just be the next chapter in a textbook. That’s a pretty exciting feeling,” she says. When she left Boston and Hot Box behind in order to take on her postdoctoral work, Danielle feared that she gave up on her passion for music in order to foster her career in science. “I realize now that one will never win out over the other,” she says. “Instead, I see my future-self striving to keep both loves in her life.”
From the science lab to guitar tabs, Dr. Danielle Stolzenberg is experimenting in redefining what it means to be a “Cool Girl!”
You can check out what Danielle’s up to in the lab at her website, www.daniellestolzenberg.com, or follow her on Twitter, twitter/drstolzenberg.
To listen to the music that Hot Box made when they were together, click on myspace.com/hotboxboston
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