Beyond the usual GRE preparation, are there any specific tips or resources for students to help make them competitive for neuroscience graduate programs?

So you’ve been paired with your mentor or protégé. Now what?

Let your Individual Development Plan (IDP) be a road map to the future you envision.

Graduate education is continually evolving. Content and practices have changed over the decades, and so have the students. The combination of women, students from historically underrepresented groups, international students, LGBT students, students with disabilities, and students with children constitutes the majority of graduate students in the United States. The diversity of individuals in graduate education means what is worth preserving and transmitting and what is rooted in assumptions about homogeneity and should be adapted or discarded needs to be examined.

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a significant global health issue. Despite historically higher rates among men, AUD prevalence and negative alcohol-related outcomes in women are rising. Loneliness in humans has been associated with increased alcohol use, and traditional rodent drinking models involve single housing, presenting challenges for studying social enrichment. We developed LIQ PARTI (Lick Instance Quantifier with Poly-Animal RFID Tracking Integration), an open-source tool to examine home cage continuous access two-bottle choice drinking behavior in a group-housed setting, investigating the influence of sex and social isolation on ethanol consumption and bout microstructure in C57Bl/6J mice. LIQ PARTI, based on our previously developed single-housed LIQ HD system, accurately tracks drinking behavior using capacitive-based sensors and RFID technology. Group-housed female mice exhibited higher ethanol preference than males, while males displayed a unique undulating pattern of ethanol preference linked ...

Autonoetic consciousness (ANC), the ability to re-experience personal past events links episodic memory and self-consciousness by bridging awareness of oneself in a past event (i.e. during its encoding) with awareness of oneself in the present (i.e. during the reliving of a past event). Recent neuroscience research revealed a bodily form of self-consciousness, including the sense of agency (SoA) and the sense of body ownership (SoO) that are based on the integration of multisensory bodily inputs and motor signals. However, the relation between SoA and/or SoO with ANC is not known. Here, we used immersive virtual reality technology and motion tracking and investigated the potential association of SoA/SoO with ANC. For this we exposed participants to different levels of visuo-motor and perspectival congruency, known to modulate SoA and SoO, during the encoding of virtual scenes and collected ANC ratings one week after the encoding session. In a total of 74 healthy participants, we successfully induced system...

Decision bias influences estimates of the absolute visual threshold. However, most psychophysical estimates of the murine absolute visual threshold have not taken bias into account. Here we developed a one-alternative forced choice (1AFC) assay to assess decision bias of mice at the absolute visual threshold via the theory of signal detection, and compared our approach with the more conventional high-threshold theoretic approach. In the 1AFC assay, mice of both sexes were trained to signal whether they detected a flash stimulus. We directly measured both Hit and False Alarm rates, which were used to estimate d′ . Using the theory of signal detection we obtained absolute thresholds by interpolating the intensity where d′ = 1 from d′ psychometric functions. This gave bias-independent estimates of the absolute visual threshold which ranged over 6-fold, averaging ∼1R* in 1,000 rods (n = 7 mice). To obtain high-threshold theoretic estimates of absolute visual threshold from the same mice, we estimated threshold...

Seth Ogden, a patent attorney with a PhD in cancer biology, describes how he uses skills developed in the research lab in his career. This video is a part of Vanderbilt University’s Beyond the Lab video series, which shows how biomedical PhDs can be used in a variety of career paths.

As the knowledge base in neuroscience continues to expand, educators need timely resources to engage their students.

In an SfN webinar, Sheena Josselyn discusses balancing family life and demanding research.