Throughout his career, Randy Nelson has worked to improve neuroscience education beyond his regular teaching obligations. He’s developed undergraduate programs at Johns Hopkins University and The Ohio State University and published more than 400 peer-reviewed articles and 11 books, including one textbook widely used in North America and Europe. In addition, he makes time to mentor, run a collaborative lab, and serve on the advisory board for several training grants. For his contributions to neuroscience education, he won the Award for Education in Neuroscience in 2017.
What led you to become so involved in other activities beyond teaching in the classroom?
I love the energy of teaching undergrads, both in the classroom and in the lab.
My interest in mentoring came from being allowed to work with grad students and postdocs as an undergraduate student and from my own experiences of having excellent mentors in graduate school. Irv Zucker, my graduate mentor at Berkeley, was excellent at motivating his trainees to succeed, and he also did an outstanding job teaching us how to ask scientific questions and design clean experiments.
I’ve also been fortunate to have other mentors during my career, including David Crews at The University of Texas, and, especially Sol Snyder, my chair at Hopkins.
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