Nina Zhang

Class of 2024
Majors in German Studies and Neuroscience; Minor in Biology

I am a senior from Philadelphia, PA. My time at Duke has been enriched by pursuing my interests in both STEM and the arts/humanities, starting with the "Science, Math & Harmony in the Renaissance" FOCUS cluster, joining the "Language, Music & Dementia" Bass Connections team, and declaring a double major in Neuroscience and German. On campus, I research novel therapeutics for spinal cord injury under Dr. Timothy Faw (for which I was awarded a 2023 Summer Neuroscience Program Fellowship), serve on the DEI Committee for the Duke German Department, am the Lead SAGE Peer Facilitator for Biochemistry 301, play clarinet in the Duke Wind Symphony, and volunteer with FEMMES+ and Duke HAND. After graduation, I hope to attend medical school and eventually practice neurology, oncology, or physical medicine & rehabilitation. In my free time, I love to read (current favorite authors are David Mitchell and Kazuo Ishiguro), solve crosswords, and go on walks!

Favorite Class: It is so difficult to choose and pit my Neuroscience and German classes against each other, but I will cheat a bit and go with Functional Neuroanatomy (Neurosci 380L) because the experience of handling a human brain was so humbling, awe-inspiring, and disorienting that I then wrote about it in my Text & Context (German 306) class. I was initially intimidated by the level of memorization and amount of content that came with studying anatomy, but I loved the way the pieces came together and I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of applying what we learned to real clinical case studies!