Understanding history’s long-term impact

University of Delaware senior Heaven Boisclair started at UD with a neuroscience major and planned to minor in history to pursue her personal interest in the field. By sophomore year, she realized she could major in both subjects, expanding her knowledge in both areas.

Boisclair was selected as a 2025 Raymond Callahan Experiential Learning Fund scholar, and this summer she combined her interests into a self-directed research experience studying the psychological impact of genocide, specifically the Holocaust, on children.

In June, she visited the archives of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where she reviewed survivor testimonies. Her initial goal was to build on existing research that shows people who experience childhood trauma can be more susceptible to PTSD or schizophrenia in adulthood by qualitatively making connections between children's experiences during the Holocaust and these neuroscientific implications.

UDaily spoke to Boisclair about how she merged her interests in neuroscience and history, and how she coped with researching such a sobering subject.

Q: Tell us more about how neuroscience and history overlap. Why are you drawing on both for your research?

Boisclair: I've always just loved history, but I also enjoy neuroscience. There is actually a lot of overlap between them. Neuroscience is technically a new area of study, and there are so many things that have happened in history that we can look back on and can view through the lens of neuroscience now. Looking at history with that perspective can really help us understand the lasting impact and secondary traumatization of something like a genocide.

People don't always realize how interwoven the sciences and humanities are, but it would be difficult to conduct research without considering the human element.

Q: Can you give an example of how you applied your neuroscience background to something you found in the archives?

Boisclair: I watched the personal testimony videos of a woman named Halina Kleiner. She was about 10 when the Nazis invaded Poland, and she was liberated at age 16.

Kleiner's oral history described how she was constantly in fear. She was seeing so many traumatizing things - people being deported, people dying.

From what I know based on current research in neuroscience, living in a state of constant fear, especially during formative years, Halina was in a position to experience a severely dysregulated nervous system for a prolonged period of time during her adolescent years, and that would set the stage for PTSD, and possibly paranoia, and depression.

It isn't possible to test her now, but a dysregulated nervous system can also lead to epigenetic effects, which can leave chemical marks on your DNA that could be passed down to generations.