Our Brainy Students
12/10/2008
This year Dominican sent its first delegation of students to the Annual Meeting for the Society for Neuroscience. It's a big step as we just instituted this new major this semester. Two students and two faculty members recently attended the conference in Washington, D.C. along with over 30,000 neuroscientists.
One of our students, Mary Petrosko, made a presentation on her honors project, "The Behavioral and Physiological Effects of Ginkgo Biloba Extract Egb 761 on Aplysia californica." Dr. Ginger Campbell, producer of the BrainScience podcast, interviewed Mary about her work and then posted an article on her blog, which is here.
Mary made a second presentation, "Mechanisms of Long-term Habituation of the Aplysia Tail-Elicited Siphon-Withdrawal Response," which was co-authored with two of our faculty members.
Our students learned a lot about advances in understanding the neurobiology of addiction, schizophrenia and synaptic plasticity among other things. They also made some great graduate school connections.
"Overall," says faculty member Bob Calin-Jageman, "it gave our students a national audience for their research, exposed them to a wide range of science careers, and infused in them the pure excitement that animates the best scientific research."
This is just one example of our commitment to giving students in-depth research experiences that will position them well for graduate school and unleash their best scholarly talent and imagination.
It depends of course on students who are curious, and more than curious but really driven to think, read, write, and investigate. It depends on faculty who love learning, love orchestrating conditions for the possibility of students' learning and thinking for themselves, and love pushing students to create their best work -- in whatever field they study or in pursuit of questions that cut across many fields.
We have all of those ingredients here, which is why I enjoy being at Dominican so much. Plus we have lots of good places to study (http://domininet.blogspot.com/2008/12/top-ten-places-to-study-on-campus.html ), a very good thing in the middle of final exam week.
This year Dominican sent its first delegation of students to the Annual Meeting for the Society for Neuroscience. It's a big step as we just instituted this new major this semester. Two students and two faculty members recently attended the conference in Washington, D.C. along with over 30,000 neuroscientists.
One of our students, Mary Petrosko, made a presentation on her honors project, "The Behavioral and Physiological Effects of Ginkgo Biloba Extract Egb 761 on Aplysia californica." Dr. Ginger Campbell, producer of the BrainScience podcast, interviewed Mary about her work and then posted an article on her blog, which is here.
Mary made a second presentation, "Mechanisms of Long-term Habituation of the Aplysia Tail-Elicited Siphon-Withdrawal Response," which was co-authored with two of our faculty members.
Our students learned a lot about advances in understanding the neurobiology of addiction, schizophrenia and synaptic plasticity among other things. They also made some great graduate school connections.
"Overall," says faculty member Bob Calin-Jageman, "it gave our students a national audience for their research, exposed them to a wide range of science careers, and infused in them the pure excitement that animates the best scientific research."
This is just one example of our commitment to giving students in-depth research experiences that will position them well for graduate school and unleash their best scholarly talent and imagination.
It depends of course on students who are curious, and more than curious but really driven to think, read, write, and investigate. It depends on faculty who love learning, love orchestrating conditions for the possibility of students' learning and thinking for themselves, and love pushing students to create their best work -- in whatever field they study or in pursuit of questions that cut across many fields.
We have all of those ingredients here, which is why I enjoy being at Dominican so much. Plus we have lots of good places to study (http://domininet.blogspot.com/2008/12/top-ten-places-to-study-on-campus.html ), a very good thing in the middle of final exam week.
