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Before Courtnie Paschall touched down at the University of Colorado Boulder, she’d graduated from the Naval Academy (‘08), attained the rank of lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and undergone years of flight training.

Paschall graduates on May 9 with a degree in neuroscience and a minor in electrical engineering. She earned the distinction of graduating summa cum laude and was named the Outstanding Graduate for the College of Arts and Sciences for spring 2015.

Paschall graduated from the Naval Academy in 2008 with a bachelor of science in physics and a minor in Mandarin Chinese. She went immediately into flight school, where she learned to pilot fixed-wing planes and helicopters.

"The blood rushed from my face. I had to walk outside and take a deep breath and just make sure that I was really willing to commit to an unknown future and give up everything this path meant.”

She was two weeks from “winging”—a graduation ceremony in which military pilots celebrate completing flight school and sign an eight-year service contract—when the Navy downsized its forces.

This was a major crossroads for Paschall, given her history with the U.S. military: her father and mother are both Marines, and her dad is still active duty.

Also, the Navy had made a large investment in Paschall’s training, both in the Naval Academy and in flight school. But with the Navy downsizing, she had the option to stay or go.

She left.

“It was terrifying,” Paschall said, recalling when her flight instructor told her commanding officer that the decision to leave or stay was hers.

“The blood rushed from my face. I had to walk outside and take a deep breath and just make sure that I was really willing to commit to an unknown future and give up everything this path meant.”

She was 23.

Paschall knew she wanted to do something else but was not sure what or where.

Still, there were signposts. She had always wanted to study neuroscience. Also, her dad, who was from Colorado, described the state this way: “God stood in Colorado and created everything else from the leftovers.”

So she picked CU-Boulder. Her arrival coincided with the semester that the university approved a new major in neuroscience.

In her thesis, Paschall’s original aim was to study the morphological impacts of schizophrenia. But the dataset she was studying “didn’t have a great representation of schizophrenic patients.”

As an alternative, she studied the morphological effects of marijuana on three subcortical brain structures often shown to be impacted by drug use in human adults.

An interesting scientific question, the scientific literature currently demonstrates conflicting results regarding the long-term effects of marijuana use on brain structure. In addition, marijuana use and the eventual development of schizophrenia have been linked.

Marie Banich, professor of psychology and neuroscience and Paschall’s thesis advisor, noted that Paschall made use of a recently released public dataset culled from more than 500 individuals.

Paschall found that the duration of marijuana use over one’s lifetime affected the shape of brain structures critical for emotion, memory and reward. Paschall is now in the process of revising her thesis for submission to a scholarly journal.

Banich described Paschall as an exceptionally bright and motivated young scholar who finished her honors’ thesis in nine months—half the time of an average honors’ student.

Paschall plans to enroll in an MD-PhD program and to focus her clinical and research efforts on mental illness.

“I could be a student the rest of my life—without exaggeration. There’s so much to know, and there’s so much interconnection that is required, moving forward in science. We’ve scattered, and connecting the pieces in each of these [scientific] tracks is so important.”

Clint Talbott is director of communications and external relations  for the College of Arts and Sciences and editor of the College of Arts and Sciences Magazine.