Scanning Her Future: Senior Sage Scott is researching how rat brains heals injuries at the KU Medical Center

Senior Sage Scott puts on her white lab coat, ready to spend hours hunched over a microscope in a dark room, illuminated by the fluorescent slides containing rat brains.

Scott is the youngest researcher in her lab, at 17 years old, the second youngest being 25. She works in the neurology lab at the University of Kansas Medical Center, researching cortical plasticity — the brain's ability to form new connections between neurons after an injury or a lifestyle change.

“What I'm doing is I look at the slides of the rat brains in the computer, and I look for where the injuries are, and then I calculate the volume of the injury to see how severe it is and how the different treatments that we've tried have been effective,” Scott said.

Scott is currently collecting data for a research paper about the effectiveness of different recovery methods in healing the damaged area from strokes and traumatic brain injuries, and how the brain self repairs without surgery or treatment.

Scott has been enrolled in the biotechnology program at the Center for Academic Achievement since her sophomore year.

In the past two years at the CAA, Scott has taken a variety of classes, all with the end goal of preparing for biotech research at the KU Medical Center during her senior year.

Scott has been interested in biotechnical research since working on a current event project in the seventh grade about the COVID vaccine’s development.

“[The project] got me really interested in how research and development works and just how there's other ways to help people that [aren’t] just being a doctor or a nurse,” Scott said.

Even though she was interested in biotechnology, taking the biotechnology course wasn’t originally Scott’s plan for high school.

“I had no idea that it was even an opportunity for me until the end of freshman year, when my honors biology teacher, Ms. Davis, recommended it to me,” Scott said. “She told me that she thought that would be a good fit because I really enjoyed taking biology freshman year.”

Biology teacher Jennifer Davis believes that Scott is a good fit for the field of biotechnology.

“She has a very good mind of being able to think outside of the box, which sometimes in science, that's what you have to do,” Davis said.

Unfortunately, as Scott sits in that dark black room analysing rat brains through the eyes of a microscope, the fear of losing funding for the lab at the KU Medical Center weighs her down.

Scott explains that other researchers in the nation have lost funding, which leads her to feel anxious about the possibility of her research on cortical plasticity losing funding as well.

“I know some of the people who were in labs last year couldn’t go back because the ones that they were in had to shut down because of funding cuts.”

It's not just research projects that lose funding, Scott mentioned that a STEM conference, the Junior Science and Humanities Symposium had to shut down due to the military cutting its budget.

The fear of losing funding has been a major struggle for Scott throughout her research journey.

“I’ve had a couple personal crises about if I even want to go into research for college,” Scott said.

Throughout the years, Scott has a group of eight girls that she’s taken the course with, including seniors Alejandra Ceron Madrigal and Hailey Poague.

“We're all very close to each other,” Poague said. “I know everything that's going on with them, and I feel like you kind of bond together because you struggle together.”

Both Ceron Madrigal and Poague are impressed with how Scott has progressed throughout the course.

“I felt in the beginning when I first met her, she was a little shy and kind of scared to talk out,” Ceron Madrigal said. “But now, when I had a class with her, she would answer every single question. She really put herself out in our program.”


Although Scott is surrounded by students her age at the CAA, she’s the youngest researcher in the old, brick lab tucked away in a corner of the KU Medical Center lab.

Despite the age difference, Scott feels well respected amongst the other researchers and doesn’t feel out of place.

“They don't treat me like I'm a kid, they treat me like a colleague,” Scott said. “They're trusting me to get data for a research paper that's going to get published.”

As of now, Scott plans to major in microbiology at the University of Denver and go into a career related to the vaccine development field or pathology.

And when she receives her first lab job, she’ll already know what size of lab coat she wears.