In VCU neuroscience lab, undergraduate Aarushi Rao brought brainpower to new software

By William Lineberry
Honors College

Aarushi Rao, a sophomore at Virginia Commonwealth University, wasn't just a small cog in a larger team this summer. She led development of a software tool for researchers to make their work efficient.

Rao, an Honors College student at Virginia Commonwealth University, participated in the Honors Summer Undergraduate Research Program, which pairs young students with faculty mentors to collaborate on research. HSURP is a partnership between the Honors College, which emphasizes experiential learning, and VCU's Wright Center for Clinical and Transitional Research, which accelerates science that promotes healthy communities.

The tool that Rao helped develop, NeuroFlow, helps researchers analyze screening images from experiments more efficiently. It also improves organization of data of the images for analysis.

"While it may seem a small improvement, I've realized that better research tools allow scientists to spend more time answering the more important biological questions in their lab instead of just manually processing data," said Rao, a biology major in the College of Humanities and Sciences.

Taking on a project like designing new software was a tall order, but Rao's HSURP mentor and partner - Guangwei Zhang, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor in the School of Medicine's Department of Neuroscience and Anatomy - embraced his protégé's potential.

"Watching Aarushi develop NeuroFlow was particularly impressive because she was involved in much more than programming," Zhang said. "She took the time to understand the needs of experimental neuroscientists, iteratively refined the user interface based on feedback and continuously improved the software's functionality and usability. … Her ability to combine software engineering with an understanding of scientific problems was one of the strongest aspects of her work during the program."

Zhang added that Rao's work on NeuroFlow will have a lasting impact beyond his neuroscience lab. It will help current and future VCU researchers "improve efficiency, reproducibility and accessibility for laboratories studying brainwide anatomy."

Rao said the impact of her summer work on her own journey will be lasting as well.

"HSURP provided me with research experience and something just as valuable, which was that it gave me the confidence to step into something that was completely unfamiliar to me and take it head on," she said of her technical focus. "I learned that just because something is unfamiliar to me should not intimidate me. I think it really helped me find a new passion for computational neuroscience."

Rao said the summer program highlighted a passion for research that she hopes to incorporate into her career as a physician.

"What the medical field is all about is iteration and improvement," she said. "I just hope to contribute to the further improvement of research over the next 10, 20 years to help people's lives just in general."

Zhang is confident in Rao's path, based on their summer research partnership.

"Over the course of the program, I watched her grow from someone learning unfamiliar concepts into a researcher who could independently identify problems, propose solutions and implement them thoughtfully," he said.