Second-year Ph.D. student in neuroscience Jasmine Benitez grew up observing her grandfather with Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia. Today, she said this is part of the reason she’s researching sleep-wake abnormalities caused by Parkinson’s disease.
Originally from Brooklyn, New York, Benitez earned her master’s degree in neurobiology at Northwestern in 2023. Now, she is a student in the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Ph.D. program researching the genetics of the circadian clock system.
Benitez said she enjoys that her research process is varied, whether she’s taking sleep recordings, conducting behavior tests or analyzing data.
“One of the things I really like about research, especially the type of research I do, is that it looks so different from day to day,” Benitez said. “I think if I was doing the same thing over and over again, it would get kind of just boring after a while.”
Benitez said the path to finding her interests was complicated: While she initially wanted to go to medical school, she pivoted when she realized she enjoyed research more.
Now, she’s going with the flow to discover her future research and career plans, she said.
“As I’ve been talking to my mentors and other faculty, realizing that they all pivoted in their careers at some point or realized that there was something else that they wanted to do at the same point, I’m not feeling as anxious about it anymore,” Benitez said. “I’m kind of just allowing myself to be excited about different things that come my way.”
Ph.D. student Daniel Bennett said he became friends with Benitez after being in the same program cohort and starting their programs at the same time.
Bennett said Benitez is a great study partner and has extra familiarity with NU’s course curriculum since she is returning from her master’s.
“Just as a testament to her work ethic, she lives like a two-hour commute to Evanston,” Bennett said. “And she will be the person who will come in at 7 o’clock in the morning to beat the traffic so that she can actually start her experiments on time and be done by whatever time it needs to be.”
Neurobiology Prof. Martha Vitaterna is Benitez’s faculty mentor.
Like Bennett, Vitaterna said some of Benitez’s best traits are being careful and organized.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had such an enthusiastic response so soon after somebody joined the lab,” Vitaterna said.
Vitaterna encouraged Benitez to apply to the Ph.D. program after Benitez’s one-year master’s degree, she said.
Benitez said the mentorships that she built were what led her to stick around at NU for her Ph.D.
“They encouraged me a lot, and they were all women, which was amazing for me,” Benitez said. “I just felt really comfortable here. And once I was comfortable, I was like, ‘I don’t really want to go anywhere else.’”
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