Neuroscience Graduate Program

Research Facilities

Facilities and Environment
The Neuroscience Department faculty have laboratories, lab and seminar space on the fourth floor of the connected L and E buildings, and associated faculty are at most a few floors away. Graduate students who have not yet selected a thesis advisor have desk space and computer in a room set aside specifically for uncommitted students.

Departmental facilities include all the necessary space and equipment to perform studies ranging from the psychoacoustics of binaural hearing to the introduction of site-directed mutations using the polymerase chain reaction; from the molecular basis of retinal degeneration to the neurobiology of taste; from the effects of loud noise on the physiology and anatomy of various stages in the auditory system to the biology of myelin production; from schizophrenia to Huntington’s to Alzheimer’s to Down’s syndrome; from excitotoxins to multiple sclerosis; from second messengers to apoptosis; from computer models of cell biology to computer models of neural circuits; from embryonic development to geriatric neurology; and from fetal alcohol syndrome to purification of proteins for crystallographic studies. The Neuroscience Department also houses a High Technology Center for Excellence for the Neurological Sciences. Support for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows is provided via two NIH training grants and research grants to individual faculty, plus there is institutional support for graduate fellowships.

School-wide facilities include the excellent Lyman Maynard Stowe Library with extensive printed holdings going back more than 50 years, plus over 1000 journals available electronically from any computer in the Health Center. There is an electron microscopy center, a histology facility, a molecular core facility for DNA sequencing and DNA array analysis and oligonucleotide synthesis, the Center for Cell Analysis and Modeling with many confocal and other state-of-the-art light microscopes, several computer centers, an NMR facility, and a new and extensive transgenic mouse facility.