Neema currently is a second year Pharmacology doctoral student in department of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics at Boston University School of Medicine. Before coming to BU, Neema attended the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where he studied Physiology and Neuroscience for his Bachelor’s degree (2011) and Neuroscience for his Master’s degree (2012). From his second year through his graduate coursework at UCSD, Neema studied Innexin gap junction proteins in Hirudo medicinalis (the medicinal leech). During his undergraduate years, he participated the leech genome project, and localized the expression of newly discovered Innexin genes to specific neurons in the embryonic leech central nervous system. For his master’s coursework, Neema studied the functional relationship between invertebrate Innexins, and vertebrate Connexins and Pannexins through site-directed mutagenesis of pan-neuronally expressed Innexin 1 and glial expressed Innexin 2, eventually leading to his discovery of dominant negative gap junction mutants. Currently, Neema is pursuing is doctoral research with Dr. Camron Bryant in the Laboratory of Addiction Genetics. His research aim is to deduce which of four candidate genes is responsible for increased methamphetamine sensitivity in specific lines of mice. To do this, he will utilize customized transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs) to knockdown each target gene in mice, followed by experiments analyzing drug sensitivity, conditioned place preference, and primary neuron cultures to assess cellular underpinnings of behavior.

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