Anju Saxena ’21.

Dollars to doughnuts, Anju Saxena ’21 will see her name in a major peer-reviewed scientific journal before she enters graduate school. Make that a maple doughnut.

“Whenever I see a place that has a maple doughnut, I go crazy,” said Saxena, a neuroscience major whose mentor, Assistant Professor of Biology Linnea Freeman, started a tradition several years ago, taking her lab students to an Augusta Street sweets spot.

“She has worked with me for at least three years, so she’s been a big part of that tradition,” said Freeman. “It’s ironic because my research is on how high-fat diets affect the brain.”

On April 13, Saxena will showcase her work during Virtual Furman Engaged Day, when she unveils her 27-page thesis, “Sex Differences in Gut-Mediated Neuroinflammation.”

Roughly translated: your gut has a trillion or so good bacteria called microbes. Feeding them bad things, like high-fat, high-sucrose doughnuts, really can mess with your head – even more so for males, as the study shows.

“And yet our lab tradition is to go eat a high-fat diet together,” said Saxena, her laughter infectious, “so we always wonder if we’re really experimenting on ourselves.”

The daughter of Naveen Saxena and Vinita Srivastava, both local physicians, Saxena caught the brain wave back at Riverside High School in Greer, South Carolina, when her sister would come home from Furman; Juhi Saxena ’19 graduated with a bachelor’s in neuroscience and now attends Wake Forest Medical School.

“It was a shared passion between us,” said Saxena.