Vaishnavi is a fourth-year doctoral candidate in Dr. Tracy Cui’s lab in the Bioengineering department. She received a combined B.S./M.S. degree in bioengineering from University of Washington, Seattle. She is currently developing polysaccharide based bioactive coatings for silicon-based microelectrodes for improving electrophysiological recording quality for chronic implantation. Chronically implanted electrode devices experience an inflammatory response which can deteriorate the recording quality. Applying a chondroitin sulfate coating is hypothesized to reduce the inflammatory response and recover the recording quality deficits. These coated microelectrodes can then be used for recording electrophysiological neuronal firing patterns in a bipolar disorder model using ClockΔ19 gene knockout mice for chronic time-points. She presented her preliminary work at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) Annual Neuroscience Meeting in 2022.