When she was in high school, Madelyn Blake was appalled by the way substance use disorders were treated as moral failings instead of medical conditions.
“Having seen the treatment options that were offered to my close family members, I became convinced that we need to find a better way to treat substance use disorders,” Blake says.
When the genome-editing CRISPR-CAS9 technology came along, it spurred her to study genetics in hopes that this and other tools could help treat substance use disorder.
In May 2024 Blake graduated from the UMN College of Biological Sciences with three majors: Neuroscience; Genetics, Cell Biology and Development; and Cellular and Organismal Physiology. Her work has also won her two national awards: an Astronaut Scholarship and a Goldwater Scholarship. Along the way, she completed a study of male rats with Kurt Prins, an associate professor in the Medical School. It indicated that a low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet may help combat dysfunction of the right ventricle in cases of hypertension in the artery leading from that ventricle to the lungs.
But Blake hasn’t waited to push back against insensitive teaching about substance abuse. Three years ago she, with peer colleagues, founded the nonprofit Brains for Change to bring a neuroscientific perspective on the subject to high schoolers.
“Because we are closer to their age, the students really respond to us,” says Blake. “We talk with them about neuroplasticity and how the brain responds to drugs. We talk about neuroscience research. It has been phenomenal.”
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