Tales of Great Teaching
GRAY MATTERS
Now entering its tenth year, Washington College’s behavioral neuroscience program is attracting high-achieving students who are getting a jump on graduate-level research.
What did you do last summer?
Ask Washington College senior Scott Gartlan this question and you just might not believe his answer.
“I conducted research on ‘The Ultrasonic Courtship Vocalizations and Preference Among B6D2-F2 Male Mice (Mus Domesticus) for the Ephemeral Pheromonal Component in Female Urine.”
Gartlan’s friends back home might think he needs to get a life, but studying behavioral neuroscience at Washington College is no trip to the zoo. It’s a rigorous program that puts students side-by-side with professors conducting weighty scientific research. In this case, Scott worked with associate professor Michael Kerchner to study the intimate connection between chemistry and consciousness—how hormones influence behavior.
“My specialization in the field of neuroscience is in the area of hormones and behavior,” explains Kerchner. “I am interested in gender differences in behavior and what role hormones may play in mediating these differences. I’m particularly interested in very early influences of hormones on development of the brain—the notion that these early patterns of hormone exposure help sculpt the developing brain and establish physical differences that contribute to the expression of gender difference in behavior during adulthood.”
The research that Gartlan and Kerchner conducted helps elucidate how hormones and other chemical messengers, in this case a pheromone in female mouse urine, are responsible for certain behaviors in the males.
It Takes Concentration
The department of psychology inaugurated the behavioral neuroscience concentration in 1992 and designed it for students with a focused interest in the biological bases of behavior and thought. Unlike the general psychology track, the program grants a bachelor of science degree because majors carry additional laboratory and research requirements. The cross-disciplinary concentration prepares students destined for careers in scientific and medical research, pharmaceuticals and pharmacology, veterinarian medicine, neurology and neuroscience.
“It was clear at the beginning of the 1990s that psychology was moving into a more biological direction, and, as a department, we had to move with it,” says Spilich.
This shift also called for new blood in the department.
“Luckily, over the past decade, we have been able to attract a very strong team of faculty to the department,” he notes. “A key hire was Mike Kerchner, who was charged with the task of starting the behavioral neuroscience program.”
What Kerchner brought to the program was a fascination with the relevancy of behavioral neuroscience, a dedication to research and a devotion to teaching students the methods of science.
“What I enjoy about the discipline—and what I think students enjoy about it—is that it is easy to formulate research hypotheses that readily produce meaningful answers,” says Kerchner.
Ultimately, he says, most students in behavioral neuroscience are motivated by the possibility that they might be part of a much bigger picture, finding solutions to human problems—a cure for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, autism, schizophrenia, addictions or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a spongiform encephalopathy similar to mad cow disease.
The questions posed are not just academic exercises, Kerchner says, but have implications for people confronting devastating neurological illnesses. The behavioral neuroscience concentration can impart the creative thinking, laboratory skills and discipline of scientific research they will need as professionals working toward solutions.
Do It
The ultimate goal of our program,” Kerchner emphasizes, “is to teach our students how to be creative and to formulate interesting research hypotheses, and then conduct the research to discover what the answers will be. They learn to do science and to advance knowledge in this field.”
As a result of this hands-on approach, behavioral neuroscience students at Washington College are doing work normally reserved for graduate level students.
Senior Ryan Behles spent last summer working under the assistant chair of the department of psychiatry at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine. Hired as a lab technician, Behles says he utilized many of the techniques used in the field of neuroscience, such as performing surgeries and testing tissue samples. All of the work he completed was used for submission in several journal articles as part of a larger project.
“It is so beneficial to work with your adviser one-on-one in their research,” Behles says. “Here, the students are doing the research—they are planning it and doing it. Many undergraduate programs do not really let undergrads get involved in research. For this field, learning the techniques of research is a very important part of the major. You could have a wonderful idea, hunch or hypothesis, but you cannot test it until you know the proper techniques to use that ensure the integrity of your results.”
Washington College’s undergraduates are considered better prepared in research techniques and methods than their peers from other institutions; they are desirable associates at research universities for summer or postgraduate positions. The department’s reputation is widespread, Spilich says, and he regularly fields calls from programs and institutions looking for qualified research interns.
Setting the Standards
Not only are the behavioral neuroscience students excelling in scientific research, the numbers prove it. As a result of the curricular emphasis on applied learning that gets even first-year students in the labs, Washington College students rank in the 98th percentile—among the top two percent in the nation—on the ETS exams in behavioral neuroscience.
In addition to the quantitative success, there are qualitative ones, too. The students regularly trek to meetings of the Eastern Psychological Association to present the results of their collaborative research, rubbing elbows and talking shop with Ph.D.s and graduate researchers whose names they recognize from the pages of the field’s scientific journals.
Senior Donald Stranahan—a premed student honored this fall with the Visitors and Governors Medal for attaining the highest academic average of his class—finds the discipline of research to be particularly beneficial to his future plans for a career in medicine
During the summer of 2000, Stranahan conducted independent research with Kerchner on the behavioral plus-maze as an index of anxiety in mice. The two presented their results at the poster session of the EPA national conference.
“This experience benefited me greatly,” Stranahan says. “First, it gave me the chance to learn research techniques that I will be able to utilize for my senior thesis project. In addition, I’ll put the laboratory and research experience I have accumulated here to good use in medical school.”
In the end, the true benefit to the students of behavioral neuroscience might be simpler and more lasting than advanced knowledge and methods of research. It’s something Spilich calls the “Ah ha!” experience.
Through close collaboration with their professors and a hands-on approach, students are raising their personal expectations of what they can do in life, explains Spilich.
“Students usually underestimate their abilities, but when they see the results of their work and see others taking an interest in their research, they finally say, ‘We really can!’”
No doubt.
Becky Stephenson ’00 well demonstrates the high-achieving track to which behavioral neuroscience students are aspiring. When she was a sophomore, Kerchner adopted Stephenson as his lab assistant and encouraged her to take his neurological research methods course. In the lab, Kerchner taught her immunocytochemistry —employing immunological methods to localize and visualize microscopic cellular components. She learned to prepare histological brain tissue sections, treat the tissue with antibody agents, visualize the antibodies using enzyme stains, and thus assess structural signs of cell death—research techniques students generally learn in a lab in graduate school. A course in psychopathology, her volunteer work as a psychiatric technician in an acute care facility and her lab experiences convinced her to pursue a career in pharmaceutical research.
With majors in psychology and biology, a minor in chemistry, and extensive research skills, Becky Stephenson was the top candidate for the neuroscience programs at two graduate schools. She accepted University of Rochester’s offer of tuition remission and an NIH student training grant.
Building the Brain Trust
This fall, the psychology department added another professor to the behavioral neuroscience program. Assistant professor Katherine Cameron specializes in the neurological bases of human memory. Cameron developed her interest in behavioral neuroscience during the “Decade of the Brain,” the 1990s so proclaimed by presidential proclamation.
“My interest in neuroscience stemmed from an interest in understanding human memory,” says Cameron. As a freshman at Davidson, Cameron read about the famous case of H.M., a patient who suffered from anterograde amnesia, an inability to remember new facts and events. H.M. was an epileptic who underwent an experimental surgery in the 1950s to remove the medial temporal regions of the brain in both hemispheres. The surgery was successful in terms of lowering his seizure frequency, but it soon became apparent that he was left with profound memory impairment.
“Although H.M. could still carry on a conversation with you and remember his childhood, if you walked out of the room for a minute and then came back in, it would be as if he had never met you before,” explained Cameron. “To this day that story makes me want to understand how the damage to H.M.’s brain could so radically and tragically change his life—every moment is lost to him after it passes. How can you have a sense of yourself or what your life means to you without memory? These types of experiences motivate me to understand the neural basis of everyday human memory experiences.”
Cameron is working with two seniors completing research projects this year. Brianne Brynelson is investigating the effects of music on the ability of subjects to learn and remember information. Patrick Curtis is comparing the emotional and physical aspects of pain perception in both migraine sufferers and non-sufferers.
“I became interested in this topic when I found an article about music and its affects on mood while looking for articles to critique for my advanced statistics class,” says Brynelson. “I could really relate to it since I regularly listen to music to enhance or change my mood. Music has different arousal effects and emotional effects, so I wanted to look into these aspects in more depth. I was curious to see how listening to music can affect both mood and memory of college students. Every college student listens to music, and many use music as background noise while they study. I am trying to determine whether music detracts or enhances a person’s ability to learn and then recall what they have learned.”
It is this type of creativity that the program encourages.
“There is an atmosphere of intellectual exploration here,” says Spilich, something he credits to the combination of the humanities and sciences that feeds students’ questions about all aspects of life. “So many of our best ideas come from conversations with students, and these have led to new research projects for us,” he says.
“I think that as human beings we all have a natural curiosity about ourselves, and this lends itself to an interest in understanding how the brain works,” says Cameron. “The social aspects of human behavior interest students, and the field of neuroscience allows a deeper understanding of the biological basis for those behaviors at the level of neurons, neuronal networks, neurotransmitter substances, and hormones.”
Cameron and her colleagues also believe that students contribute as much as they gain to the study of behavioral neuroscience. There is no reason why an undergraduate cannot help to advance knowledge in the field.
“If the research is of a high enough caliber and makes a significant, original contribution to the field, then it will be published and be well-received, regardless of the differing levels of education of the authors,” Cameron says. “Although some student projects may not rise to the level of peer-reviewed publications, by striving to achieve that goal, our students benefit greatly in that they receive a more rigorous scientific training and learn to think creatively, independently and critically from their research experience.”
John Buettner is the media relations associate for Washington College. After writing this article, he decided to give his brain to science. They didn’t want it.
|
