Our course for sophomore neuroscience majors, Experimental Methods in Neuroscience, offers a wide range of opportunities for students to conduct research. For many students, the highlight is the opportunity to cut and stain their first brain! All enjoy working in a small team to conduct an experiment that has never been done before, building on the most current published journal articles.

In Spring 2015, we added a new opportunity, using a technique to measure circadian rhythms from zebrafish using a bioluminescent gene reporter. This was developed with our lab instructor, Carla Velez, Swati Sharma ’15, Nina Wren’16, and Marilyn Romero’17. We presented initial results at the October 2015 meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. See their poster here: http://osf.io/wmrg5

In Spring 2016-2018 we worked with Narendra Pathak to investigate behavioral phenotypes of reelin mutant zebrafish that were generated by first-year students using CrispR in a HHMI-funded research-based laboratory course. 

We have been using DataCamp to learn R for data analysis. You can see some of our data and example R code for students at our Open Science Framework site http://osf.io/wmrg5

The 2018 syllabus for Experimental Methods in Neuroscience is here: Nsc_230_syllabus_spring_2018