This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This project will renovate outdated laboratory space on the third floor of Butterfield Hall on the campus of Union College to create a Center for Neuroscience. The Center for Neuroscience will co-locate the neuroscience faculty research labs, enabling the core faculty to run their research program more effectively and share scientific resources more efficiently. An anticipated outcome of the enhanced facilities is increased interactions between neuroscience program faculty with each other and with students as well as collaborative research opportunities with student and faculty in the computer science, electrical and mechanical engineering, and bioengineering programs which are adjacent to the new Center's location.
Faculty in the renovated labs will conduct research and research training in areas of neuroplasticity, human cognitive abilities and behavioral dispositions, gender differences in spatial cognition, cognitive genetics, neural control of behavior, and basic molecular mechanisms underlying neurological disorders. Research techniques to be enabled by the Center include intracellular recording and dye injection of individual neurons, high-seed analysis of flight behavior, behavioral methodologies, neuroimaging, and electrophysiological techniques. Examples of research activities proposed for the new Center for Neuroscience include elucidating brain changes, i.e. neuroplasticity, that are involved in acquiring a new cognitive skill, understanding the individual differences in human cognitive abilities and the neural mechanisms that underlie them, investigating the neural control of behavior in flying insects to understand the structure and function of neurons involved in visual control of stable flight, and studying the basic molecular mechanisms underlying specific neurological disorders.
With the new Center for Neuroscience, the College's students will have access to cutting-edge, technologically advanced, and diverse research opportunities that are usually only available to graduate students and post-doctoral research staff as much larger institutions. The Center will enable the College to accommodate the growing research and research training needs of the neuroscience interdisciplinary program, which was created in response to student demand in 2003. Additionally, the renovated research facility is expected to be used by participants of Union's Summer Science Workshop, a program for rising high school students traditionally underrepresented in the sciences and those facing economic disadvantages.
This project established a Center for Neuroscience at Union College to accommodate its rapidly growing neuroscience program. The renovations significantly enhanced the entire third floor of Butterfield Hall, a multidisciplinary undergraduate research facility (floors one and two have been previously renovated to house the Center for Bioengineering). Specifically, the project co-localized the neuroscience faculty labs and offices into the Center for Neuroscience, enabling the core faculty to run their research programs more effectively and share resources more efficiently. This facility replaced the outdated, antiquated state of faculty laboratory facilities that were previously used by the PI and Co-PIs. As anticipated the enhanced facilities increased interaction between neuroscience program faculty with each other and with students and also enabled increased interaction with the students and faculty in the computer science, electrical and mechanical engineering, and bioengineering programs. Additionally, the renovations enabled several faculty who actively contribute to both neuroscience and bioengineering (including Co-PIs Dr. Olberg and Dr. Chu-LaGraff) to co-locate within the same research facility to promote shared resources and facilitate research collaborations with bioengineering faculty. The Center for Neuroscience has allowed Union’s neuroscience program to fully take advantage of its ambitious interdisciplinary structure and beginnings by making it easier for faculty conducting neuroscience research to run their labs, and therefore develop a greater number of high quality research training opportunities for students. The award-supported renovations have enabled significant progress on several scientific and broader impacts. Scientifically, this award has enabled research into: 1) the neural basis of prey tracking and capture in adult dragonflies which has possible implications for understanding visual processing in humans and possible applications in the development of flight interception systems; 2) The embryonic neural, and cardiac development using Drosophila (fruit flies) as a model. This research has possible implications for early diagnosis and treatment of these developmental disorders; 3) studies regarding the cognitive and neural mechanisms of General Intelligence (g) which is one of the most reliable and predictive dimensions of individual differences among human beings, which has implications in a wide variety of life outcomes, such as educational attainment, income, job performance, and even longevity; and 4) Studies of skill related neuronal plasticity, which has possible implications for understand recovery after brain injury, neurodegenerative disorders and normal education in many general settings. More Broadly the projects impacts have lead to published results from work conducted pursuant to Scientific Metrics noted above in Psychological Science, PLoS, The International Journal of Developmental Biology. In addition Some of the dragonfly work has been featured in the New York Times Science issue (April 2, 2013). The Principal Investigators have also presented results at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual meeting, International Congress of Neuroethology, East Coast Nerve Net, the annual Experimental Biology meeting, many presentations by students at Union College’s undergraduate Steinmetz Symposium, and other invited lectures by the PIs. All the PIs expect that future results enabled by the award will be published in similar high impact journals and presented at similar international meetings. Finally, the new Center for Neuroscience has attracted a large number of students and faculty to the space and has become a home for neuroscience students. As a reflection of the booming growth in the field, Neuroscience has become the largest interdisciplinary program at Union College. The number of majors has grown from 28 in the year prior to the renovation of Butterfield (2010-2011) to almost 100 current majors. This past academic year, there were 26 seniors graduating as neuroscience majors. A recently instituted assessment program tracking where students end up post-graduation, suggests that in the upcoming graduating class, one-third plans to take a gap year before pursuing graduate school or professional schools (e.g. medical, physician’s assistant). The remainder of students (i.e., two thirds), plan to either apply to graduate or professional schools, or enter the work force in neuroscience related fields. In addition the Center for Neuroscience has attracted local high school students as well. Overall the three principal investigators involved in this project regard it as a success in establishing the Neuroscience program at Union college as a model for undergraduate neuroscience education and research training.
