Grooming the New Neuroscientists

Professors John Schmidt and Li Niu of the Department of Chemistry served as neuroscience mentors for Lisa Schlueter and Leivi Sosa, at right, participants in the summer Research Experience for Undergraduates program. Behind them is a model of the University's new Life Sciences Building, which will house much of the campus's chemical, biological and psychological research beginning in 2004.

The study of the brain is burgeoning. As scientists make strides in unraveling the human genome, they face the fact that more than 50 percent of human genes are expressed in the brain and nowhere else in the body. “Meanwhile,” says UAlbany biologist John Schmidt, “many other genes expressed elsewhere in the body are also expressed in the brain.”

The challenge is large and complex, and requires both established and creative new approaches. Many of those approaches will come from an infusion of new researchers into the field, and that is where UAlbany’s Center for Neuroscience Research is making a difference.

In 2001, the Center joined a prestigious group of research centers nationwide through a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation in an effort to encourage undergraduate students to explore and then prepare for careers in neuroscience areas of biology, chemistry, psychology, biomedicine and public health.

As one of six Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Training Sites in neuroscience — others are located at Duke; the universities of Illinois, Massachusetts, and Kentucky; and Brigham Young — UAlbany conducts a 10-week summer program for undergraduates representing colleges in the Capital Region and across the eastern U.S.

Aiming for ten students per year, the program actually exceeded that number by three and one, respectively, in 2001 and 2002. While undergraduates have come to Albany from institutions as large as Yale University to explore the possibility of pursuing neuroscience research into their graduate school years, Schmidt said that the Summer Institute’s value for small college students is of particular value.

“The students at small colleges usually can’t knock on the doors of professors who are doing this kind of research and they can’t tackle undergraduate research projects in the neurosciences themselves,” said Schmidt, director of UAlbany’s Neuroscience Research Center. “Here, they have such professors as their mentors and receive a stipend to do this work and not have financial concerns.

“Many of these students are getting a real head start. One student I mentored had just finished his freshman year at SUNY Geneseo, and he was just great.”
Responses to the experience among participating students have been very positive. “The REU Summer program was a thoroughly intense research experience,” said Lisa Schlueter, who studied brain development in the summer 2002 program under the mentorship of UAlbany psychologist Christine Wagner.

“The program offered the rare opportunity to explore the independence, discipline, and responsibility necessary to conduct one’s own original research. In addition to working with our assigned mentors, we were encouraged to contribute at seminars, making it a truly interactive experience. I’d say that the wealth of knowledge I gained was unmatched by any classroom experience I’ve had.”

UAlbany biologist Gregory Lnenicka, who along with psychologist Cheryl Frye is a co-director of the REU program, said that through in-depth training in research, “the students explore questions addressed by current neuroscience research, experimental design and techniques, research ethics, the presentation of scientific data, and career options.”

Lnenicka, Frye, Wagner and Schmidt are among approximately 20 UAlbany faculty members in the various neuroscience fields who serve as Center associates. “Individual students do more than work with individual faculty,” said Schmidt. “We have a program of classes/discussions at the beginning that acquaints the students with research in the other labs as well. We bring in outside speakers from all over the Northeast for Friday seminars. At the end of ten weeks the students give presentations so they can hear about each other’s research. And we even have social activities. Last year we took the students whitewater rafting on the upper Hudson River one weekend and to the Adirondacks for a day of hiking, kayaking, swimming, and mountain biking on another.”

The Center, established in 1969 initially to focus on the development and plasticity of the nervous system, has evolved into broader studies into neural development and regeneration, genetic and hormonal control of behavior, and synaptic function and plasticity. These interests, in turn, are applicable to the study of Alzheimer’s Disease, epilepsy, strabismus, amblyopia, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and Parkinson’s disease.