Neuroscience

Neuroscience is the study of the structure and function of neurons and how they are assembled to produce behaviors.

Neuroscience was implemented as a new interdisciplinary major in 1999, replacing the Psychobiology Program and providing a strong foundation in neuroscience and related courses.

Our students benefit from small classes and investigative labs in their introductory and advanced courses.

Our majors graduate with a liberal arts background and a strong foundation in neuroscience which allows them to proceed to medical school or attend top-ranked graduate neuroscience, cognitive science, and psychology Ph.D. programs, including哥伦比亚，Duke,Harvard, MIT,西北，UC Berkeley，UCLA，uc圣地亚哥，UCSF,UMass Medical School,大学。辛辛那提，和Ut Southwestern。

神经科学部门成功的最佳证明：

• 60%的毕业生proceed to medical school;
• 我们毕业生的20％继续在神经科学，心理学或神经心理学的研究生工作;
• 10 percent of our graduates pursue careers that intersect with neuroscience—for example, patent law or work in the biotech industry.

Faculty Research Discoveries

谷氨酸是哺乳动物脑中的主要兴奋性神经递质，其突触水平主要由谷氨酸转运蛋白紧密调节，主要位于胶质胶上。在Nematode，C.Elegans，主要的兴奋性神经递质是乙酰胆碱，但谷氨酸神经递质对许多功能仍然至关重要。谷氨酸突触在C.Elegans没有胶质环包围，并且六种谷氨酸转运蛋白表达，只有一个在神经元中发现。因此，谷氨酸转运在C中的作用是什么？Elegans还在Bauer Lab中，我们正在研究具有谷氨酸转运蛋白的蠕虫。到目前为止，我们发现简单行为，学习和记忆，新陈代谢，甚至寿命的变化！

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22306776

在这方面Developmental Cell纸, the Beltz lab demonstrates that the neural precursors generating new neurons in the brains of adult crayfish come from the immune system. This surprising finding suggests a much closer relationship between the nervous system and immune system than was previously recognized, and has implications for organisms that are higher on the evolutionary tree.

Dr. Gobes has discovered that motor regions play a role in the acquisition of vocalizations (Nature Neuroscience）。最近，她表明，在鸣禽大脑的温尼克般的地区的听觉记忆中左半球优势与经验一起发展（PNAS和科学报告）。

照片由ivar pel

今年夏天金妮一直致力于在皮带和Tetel实验室之间致力于看小鼠的下丘脑神经源性活性的合作研究项目。这项工作一直非常令人兴奋，允许金妮将她的背景和技能与小鼠联系起来，以探索小龙虾免疫系统和神经发生之间的关系的当前研究。

我们的实验室研究雌激素如何影响女性小鼠的代谢和焦虑。雌激素对女性和女性啮齿动物的体重增加和焦虑产生深远的影响。例如，绝经后妇女降低了雌激素水平，导致焦虑和体重增加增加，这增加了它们肥胖，糖尿病，心脏病和癌症的风险。雌激素对女性小鼠焦虑和新陈代谢具有类似的影响。我们和其他人表明，患有高脂饮食的卵巢切除小鼠变得肥胖，而用雌激素治疗的小鼠仍然是瘦肉（Bless等., 2014）。We have extended these studies on energy homeostasis to include how estrogens influence the gut microbiome, which is a collection of microorganisms (bacteria, viruses, archaea, protozoa and fungi), their genomes and the factors they produce in the gut. The gut microbiome has been implicated in a variety of disorders and diseases, including obesity, diabetes, depression and anxiety (Tetel等等。，2018年）。Using genetically altered mice that lack the hormone leptin (ob/ob) and are obese (Acharya等等。，2019年), we found that obesity and estrogens were associated with reduced diversity of the gut microbial community. Understanding the role of estrogens in regulating gut microbiota will provide important insights into hormone-dependent disorders of anxiety and metabolism in women.

The Wasserman Lab uses the fruit fly,果蝇, to examine how well-defined sensory circuits demonstrate both robustness and flexibility required to generate appropriate behavior in the face of changing internal and external environments. To read more about how we use 'virtual-reality' flight simulators, shown in the image here, please visit:www.wassermanlab.com。

威斯特实验室使用多电极阵列电生理记录在表现大鼠中调查感知和注意的神经基础。我们的最新纸张（南达等2019年) analyzed average field potential responses to tones presented to rats while they performed a go/no-go discrimination task that requires sustained attention. We wanted to see to what extent the rat brain responses were analogous human neural responses during similar tasks—because the cellular mechanisms of sensory processing are more accessible to experiments in rats than humans. We found a component of the evoked potential response (the “P2” peak) that signaled detection of the “target” tone analogously to the human response, but did not observe any response component that signals “response inhibition” (a.k.a. impulse control) as has been reported in the human EEG literature. Our contribution constrains models of auditory processing in the rat brain, and characterizes similarities and differences with auditory processing in the human brain.