Caitlin Cowan

Caitlin Cowan, Ph.D., is a post-doctoral candidate at UCC (University College Cork) in Ireland where she specializes in Neuroscience and Gut-Brain Axis research.

Caitlin grew up, “on the other side of the world!”, in Sydney, Australia, where she jokes that, “everything is upside down and we all ride kangaroos to school!”. Similarly, to New York City, Sydney is “large and beautiful”, however, has, “. . . a few less people and a few more beaches.”.

This summer Caitlin flew across the Atlantic to join the RockEDU Crew at The Rockefeller University, and develop her professional science outreach and science communication skills. Over that period of time, she’s been working on some exciting new additions to our RockEDU website, and can be found in an upcoming RockEDU Online blog post (stay tuned!).

What’s your favorite thing about being a scientist? Did you always want to be a scientist?

“I think a part of me always wanted to be a scientist, even before I knew what a scientist was – I was always curious and loved to learn and I even started doing my own little research projects on my favourite animals from a pretty young age (I was definitely always a nerd!)”

Tell us about yourself outside of science. How do you spend your time outside of lab?

“I love to travel and take photos, mostly of my travels. This summer I’ve taken up dog-sitting as another hobby, which is basically the best thing ever.”

Why did you decide to come to NYC?

“To join the RockEDU crew! . . . I’ve started to get the scicomm/outreach bug so I wanted to come here and learn from the best in the business.”

When you are done training, do you plan to stay in NYC

“Sadly I’ll be leaving NYC at the end of the summer to head back to Ireland. After that I’m planning to go back home to Australia, but somehow I’ve always been drawn back to NYC so who knows?!”