The University’s Neuroscience and Behavior (NS&B) department hosted its first ever symposium this past Saturday, featuring presentations by five recent NS&B alumni who described their research and talked with students about graduate and career options.
“I think that one of the goals of this event is to get to have a kind of unique mentoring exercise for our current and prospective majors,” said Chair of the NS&B Program John Kirn, who organized the event. “Being able to see fairly recent graduates and being able to talk to them about what kind of choices they made and why is a very valuable experience for students.”
The alumni presented research from several different graduate programs: two from UCSF, two from Harvard University Medical School, and one from the University of Pittsburgh. The alumni were introduced by NS&B professors with whom they had worked closely during their undergraduate research.
“Honestly, I think these are kind of the favorites of every professor,” said Lianne Morris-Smith ’04, now a second-year grad student with the NS&B department.
Joshua Gooley ’00 presented his ongoing research done on the Circadian Timing system, a roughly 24-hour cycle in the physiological processes of plants and animals. His studies focus on how light reception regulation and scheduled feeding regulation affects the Circadian rhythms of lab rats. Current students studied his work in Behavioral Neurobiology, a class taught by Professor Naegele.
“I really liked hearing about Josh Gooley’s work,” said Jess Ghofrani ’08, who has a double major in NS&B and Science in Society. “At first I didn’t make the connection…but it was cool, because I realized we had actually studied him.”
Mauricio Delgado ’97, who was recently hired as an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, spoke about his research in reward-related processing in humans. He presented various reward-related card games and visual sequences to test subjects, using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to monitor subjects’ nuclear and ventral striatum, parts of the brain.
“[His work] seemed most related to what I’m interested in,” said NS&B major Amanda Leibenhaut ’08. “I’m more interested in psychology work…so I also wanted to ask him if he’s done any out of lab research.”
During lunch, the alumni held an open forum where students asked advice about options after graduation.
“There are really three categories…academics, medicine, and industry,” said Mauricio Delgado ’97. “With all of us here, industry is very underrepresented.”
Students also asked the alumni what graduate schools look for in their applicants. Megan Carey ’96, a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Harvard Medical School, noted that research experience from Wesleyan looks excellent on her resume.
The alumni talked about how to evaluate medical and graduate schools, encouraging University students to meet with graduate students at schools they are considering to get a sense of the working atmosphere. They stressed the importance of assessing the lab in particular, where students would be spending the majority of their time. Additionally, alumni talked about the importance of size and location when considering graduate schools, the advantages and disadvantages of working towards a PhD, and whether or not to take time off.
“The positive is it’s easier to take time off between undergraduate and graduate school rather than between graduate and post-grad,” Delgado said.
About 50 people attended the symposium, which was followed by an informal lunch and open forum. In addition to the mix of undergraduate and graduate students, many attendees were current faculty or alumni. According to Kirn, invitations to attend and present were sent out to all alumni from the NS&B major going back to 1996, and a small number of them were ultimately chosen by Kirn out of those who showed interest.
“This is being funded exclusively by the Neuroscience and Behavior department budget,” Kirn said. “We wanted to do it on a big scale, but this is about as much as we could afford.”
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