Ainsley Westbrook, a rising senior biomedical engineering major at Mercer University, is one of three Mercer students awarded a 2025 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship, alongside Wesley Kinney and Isabella Phillips. Her grandmother’s death from dementia pushed her toward neuroscience, and she now works in two labs: with Dr. Joanna Thomas she built a 3D model of a biliary stent and measures stress, strain, and deformation to confirm it will not fracture during deployment; with Dr. Katie Northcutt she studies how postnatal hypothyroidism affects anxiety, compulsivity, impulsivity, and cognition in young rats — a model for reported links between maternal hypothyroidism and ADHD or autism. Northcutt says Westbrooks engineering perspective brings unusual creativity to a lab of neuroscience, biology, and psychology majors.