Seminars & Events
Monday, February 11, 2013: Dr. Daphne Soares (University of Maryland College Park) will speak on "The Sensory World of Cavefishes" at 4:45 pm in Goodpaster Hall 195.
Monday, March 4, 2013: Dr. Joe Cheer (University of Maryland Baltimore) will speak on "Endogenous Cannabinoids and the Pursuit of Reward" at 4:45 pm in Goodpaster Hall 195.
Friday, April 12, 2013: Dr. Jill McGaughy (University of New Hampshire) will speak on "The Role of Cortical Norepinephrine in the Ontogeny of Executive Function" at 3:00 pm in Schaefer Hall 106.
Alumni Highlight
Dr. Erin Johnson '02 recently received her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Rochester School of Medicine, and was inducted as an alumni member of Nu Rho Psi.
SMP Spotlight
Ron Saul, "Chronic activation of the substantia nigra nociceptin/orphanin receptor induces motor deficits similar to Parkinson's disease," 2008. Saul, the 2008 winner of the Neuroscience Award, infused a drug into the substantia nigra of rats and measured the resulting motor behaviors, mood disturbances, and cognitive abilities.
Rees, Steven (2012). Ethanol influence modeling : investigation and experimentation. (Mentor: J. Ramcharitar)
Abstract
Ethanol, the psychoactive depressant ingredient of alcoholic beverages, has been found to influence various aspects of cognition, interfering with the human mind’s ability to interpret external and internal cues. This leads to various cognitive impairments, in turn causing problems with vision, verbal fluency, primary process thinking, and a variety of other factors. Understanding more about ethanol’s effects on the body would be valuable from healthcare and economic standpoints, yet elucidating ethanol’s mechanisms of action is difficult due to complexity of the human body and ethanol’s variable effects on different individuals. To better understand ethanol’s modes of action in body systems, a variety of animal models, including vertebrates and invertebrates, have been used. As more complex organisms, vertebrates represent a close bridge to human systems, allowing reactions to ethanol to be more translatable to human observation. But, even these systems can be too complex to fundamentally understand, lending value to well-documented and studied invertebrate systems even without direct application to human study. The medicinal leech Hirudo verbana shows strong promise as an ethanol influence model candidate. This paper explores various animal models, and shows through some initial experiments how leech nervous systems have much to show about ethanol’s mechanism of action.
