WATCH: Philly Teen Gave Fruit Flies Anxiety to Understand What Makes Us Anxious

Gavriela Beatrice Kalish-Schur asked what’s happening on a cellular level with anxiety to help inform the development of more effective treatments.

This video is a part of our ongoing STEM Superstars series. Meet all of the young trailblazers here.

Gavriela Beatrice Kalish-Schur knew from an early age that STEM was for her. But it was in high school that she knew she wanted to specialize in neuroscience, “I think because we know so little about the brain,” she said.

She also knew that anxiety impacts many young people, and that current therapies aren’t as effective as they could be, or they’re very expensive — or both.

The 18-year-old senior at Julia R. Masterman High School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, said she was interested in understanding what’s happening on a cellular level with anxiety to help inform the development of more effective treatments.

Her experiment: Make fruit flies anxious. She targeted a certain brain pathway called IRE1, knocking it down in the flies. “Knocking down is like turning down the volume when you’re listening to music,” she explained. 

Then she observed their behavior. And like the proverbial wallflower at a school dance, the fruit flies clung to the wall of the petri dish, rather than spread over the surface as they normally would. In other words, the flies exhibited anxious behavior.

Kalish-Schur discovered that these flies had different protein levels than the control group. Understanding the relationship between the IRE1 pathway and anxiety, she said, can lead to more targeted treatments for anxiety in humans. 

”We can use what we already know and new techniques to develop cures for diseases that harm a lot of people,” Kalish-Schur said.

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