The FENS-SfN Summer School on Neurodevelopmental Psychiatric Disorders took place June 22-28, 2014, in in Bertinoro, Italy. Watch an interview with the scientific organizers of the FENS-SfN Summer School 2014 on Neurodevelopmental Psychiatric Disorders.

Far from being an extra or time-permitting task, mentoring is as essential to a faculty member’s success as teaching, research, and publication.

Mara Dierssen is a senior scientist at the Centre for Biomedical Research on Rare Diseases and the president of the Spanish Society for Neuroscience. She shares her insight about the challenges women face in neuroscience from her experience working and advancing in the field, and she offers advice to other women pursuing a career in neuroscience.

The FENS-SfN Summer School on Neurodevelopmental Psychiatric Disorders took place June 22-28, 2014, in Bertinoro, Italy. Erika Forbes, PhD, from the University of Pittsburgh talks about Neural Reward Circuitry: Typical Development, and Role in Adolescent Depression and Substance Use.

Did you know that NIH’s Office of Extramural Research (OER) has a dedicated portal of resources to help you understand the ins and outs of NIH funding opportunity announcements (FOAs)?

Career transitions are bound to happen as your professional and personal needs and interests evolve. Personally, I’ve made four moves, switching cities and states, titles, and responsibilities each time.

Despite our best intentions, we all perceive and treat people differently based on race and ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and other factors.

Learning to solve a new problem involves identifying the operating rules, which can be accelerated if known rules generalize in the new context. We ask how prior experience affects learning a new rule that is distinct from known rules. We examined how rats learned a new spatial navigation task after having previously learned tasks with different navigation rules. The new task differed from the previous tasks in spatial layout and navigation rule. We found that experience history did not impact overall performance. However, by examining navigation choice sequences in the new task, we found experience-dependent differences in exploration patterns during early stages of learning, as well as differences in the types of errors made during stable performance. The differences were consistent with the animals adopting experience-dependent memory strategies to discover and implement the new rule. Our results indicate prior experience shapes the strategies for solving novel problems, and the impact of prior experien...

Considering a career in academia? Small liberal arts institutions are just one of many options. See if they’re the right fit for you by learning about the opportunities and challenges in this type of environment.

At large research universities, it is your responsibility as a student to seek out and engage faculty members. It is unrealistic to expect a professor will come along, recognize your need for a mentor, and generously provide that personal and professional relationship.