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Dr. Marinkovic is currently a postdoctoral fellow in Jeffrey Fredberg’s laboratory in the Department of Environmental Health at Harvard School of Public Health. Her research has focused extensively upon the characterization of cells' biophysical properties with an emphasis on the molecular mechanisms that regulate these properties. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Barcelona, Spain, where she studied the biomechanical properties of airway epithelial cells using magnetic twisting cytometry.
She is working on the characterization of the deformability of RBC and its changes in disease states in particular, how the malaria parasite, Plasmodium Falciparum, interacts with its host by altering its rheological properties. She brings to this research a multi-disciplinary approach that combines a rigorous education in biophysics, cell biology, and quantitative methods. By integrating information on how cells remodel and modulate their biophysical properties with studies on protein expression, she seeks to establish some connections among protein structure, mechanical properties of cells, and possible effects on disease progression.
Dr. Snedeker’s research examines how children learn language and how they make sense of speech as they are hearing it. To explore these questions, she and her students chart the course of language development in a variety of populations that vary in their experiences and their abilities (internationally-adopted children, cochlear implant users, children with autism, and typically developing toddlers).
They examine children’s comprehension and knowledge of language by tracking their eye movements as they listen to speech. These eye movements provide rich information about the moment-to-moment processes involved in understanding speech. For example, young children who hear the word “horse” while looking at a picture of farm animals will begin shifting their eyes to the horse before the word is even completed.
The research enablement grant will allow Dr. Snedeker to purchase a state of the art automated eye-tracking system. This will streamline data collection and allow her to employ this technique with a wider variety of participants.
Dr. Snedeker received her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science