Student Spotlight: Hannah Hortman

This month's student spotlight featured Hannah Hortman, a senior majoring in Neuroscience and minor in Computational Biology, and Chinese. Hannah is one of two Neuroscience students nominated for this year’s Faculty Scholar Award. This nomination, by itself, is quite an honor. Several highly competitive majors put in a bid for nomination.

For Hannah, the path to neuroscience began with a spark of curiosity in middle school. While participating in the Positivity Project, a project with a goal to help middle schoolers develop their interpersonal skills, she encountered a video that explained the power and complexity of the human brain. The idea that a single organ could control every thought, feeling, and action really stood out to her, and nearly a decade later, that moment still stands out as the beginning of her interest in neuroscience. Hannah’s fascination with the brain continued to grow through her years training as a competitive figure skater.

Like many competing athletes, Hannah often experienced competition anxiety. Seeing the effectiveness of psychological techniques shown to her by a sports psychologist to overcome competition anxiety led Hannah to wonder what was actually happening in the brain to produce such a transformative result. This furthered her curiosity in how and why the brain functions. The final push for Hannah to pursue a Neuroscience degree happened at Precision Brain Center, a functional neurology clinic. The clinic provided a hands-on look at brain healing through noninvasive treatments like eye movement exercises and nerve stimulation instead of prescription medications. Hannah gained a lot of knowledge of neural circuitry and how these techniques work to rewire connections in the brain, and this propelled her desire to learn more about the biological underpinnings of neuroscience.

While neuroscience is incredibly versatile due to its interdisciplinary nature, this strength can also be a double-edged sword. Without a clearly defined career path beyond research or medicine, it can feel overwhelming for students to navigate the wide range of possibilities. This sentiment resonates with Hannah and many other Neuroscience and STEM majors. It has taken her a while to figure out what she would like to do in the future, and in many ways, she is still in the discovery phase. She would love to see more career path resources offered to neuroscience students, such as talks from previous alums about opportunities that Neuroscience majors have after college. She believes this could help inspire undergraduates early on to forge their own career paths and cultivate their unique interests rather than trying to conform to the paths that have already been created for research and medicine.

As an aspiring computational neuroscientist or neuroscience software engineer, Hannah immersed herself in both experimental and computational research. She is part of Dr. Nicole Calakos’ neurobiology lab and Dr. John Pearson’s computational neuroscience lab. While balancing roles in two research labs requires strategic time management, Hannah finds the experiences rewarding, as the dual exposure is helping her build a solid foundation toward her future career goals.

In Dr. Calakos’ lab, she contributes to studies on the integrated stress response (ISR), a biochemical pathway linked to neurodegeneration in Parkinson’s Disease. Building on this work, she launched an independent study exploring the potential of an HIV protease inhibitor, ritonavir, as a neuroprotective treatment, with the hope that this could serve as a drug therapeutic for Parkinson’s Disease. In Dr. Pearson’s lab, she is helping develop a machine learning–based pipeline for analyzing vocal learning in songbirds. This software aims to assist researchers in identifying meaningful patterns in vocal data with greater accuracy and efficiency. Hannah hopes to build a career that blends these disciplines to improve both research methods and human health outcomes.

Beyond her academic pursuits, Hannah is actively engaged in the Duke community. She’s a member of Duke Chinese Dance, LangDorm, and Duke Vertices. Dance, in particular, has become a meaningful part of her college life, offering both creative expression as a form of stress relief and a great community she can rely on. Hannah finds balance and joy through the arts, whether she is rehearsing for a show or connecting with fellow performers.

As she reflects on her academic journey, Hannah wishes she had embraced risk-taking sooner. “I spent a lot of time afraid of failure,” she says, “but in most cases, when I took the risk, I ended up learning something valuable—even if it didn’t work out.” It’s a mindset she hopes more students will adopt: one that views uncertainty not as a barrier, but as an invitation to grow.

Looking ahead, Hannah plans to work as a research assistant after graduation to explore a variety of projects and fine-tune her research interests, with the end goal of obtaining a Ph.D. in neuroscience. Her ultimate goal is to work on developing computational tools to advance neuroscience research. While she is unsure of the framework for how she will achieve that goal—whether through open-source neuroscience software development or answering research questions using computational methods—either path will lead to an interdisciplinary career in neuroscience and computer science, committed to making a positive impact on human health.