“Two errors: 1. To take everything literally. 2. To take everything spiritually.”— Blaise Pascal
Faculty Information
Additional Faculty Information for Kiralyn Brakel
Education
PhD, Neuroscience, Texas A&M University, 2020
BS, Biology, Hillsdale College, 2015
Biography
My interest in biology began in high school when I started training in a style of karate that focused on joint and nerve manipulation in self-defense. Learning how to break the body sparked an interest in understanding how it’s put together. I took introductory anatomy and physiology in high school, which launched my love of the subject. Biology (particularly physiology) explains how we function, and it’s one of the many paths of knowing we take to understand ourselves. I studied biology in college and then neuroscience in graduate school as a way of understanding humanity. How do we work? How do we think? What makes us human? These are some of the big questions that drive all fields of study, and questions that I naively believed I might be able to understand through my study of neuroscience. They are questions bigger than any single field but, in helping students grasp some small part of biology, I hope that we are all inching our way closer to understanding.