As a PhD student in the Aronov lab, Applegate worked with food-caching black-capped chickadees that remember and manage the locations of thousands of hidden seeds. Applegate developed a new behavioral paradigm for the quantitative analysis of seed-caching behavior and its underlying neurobiology in a controlled laboratory setting. Her work investigated the neural foundation of these behaviors, applying anatomical and functional approaches to identify specific brain regions that exhibit striking parallels to memory systems in mammals. These research findings expand and sharpen our understanding of the avian hippocampus and how its neural connections enable these behaviors, and led to her receipt of the Lindsley Prize. Applegate completed her PhD in 2023 and is currently a postdoctoral associate in the lab of Dr. Rui Chang, studying how the peripheral nervous system senses the body’s natural internal physiology.