All News

Assistant Professor of Psychology Jeremy I. Skipper gave an invited talk in a workshop sponsored by the Experimental Psychology Society (EPS) Jan. 7-8 at University College London. In “Hearing lips and… hands, smiles and print too: How listening to words in the wild is not all that auditory to the brain” he discussed the role of visual contextual cues in the processing of auditory information.

Stone Professor of Psychology Douglas Weldon presented a poster titled “Visual Cortical Evoked Potentials During and After MK-801 Administration in Rats” at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience on Nov. 16 in Washington, D.C.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Jeremy Skipper has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to be used for upgrading lab equipment. The equipment is needed for a project to develop a procedure capable of analyzing brain data resulting from naturalistic stimuli for application to 4-D EEG data.

Dean of Faculty Patrick D. Reynolds announced the appointment of two of Hamilton's most outstanding teacher-scholars to endowed chairs. Professor of Biology David Gapp was appointed to the Silas D. Childs Chair, and Professor of Psychology Jonathan Vaughan was appointed to the James L. Ferguson Chair. Both appointments were effective July 1.

Serotonin is a neurotransmitter linked to aggression, depression, and neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. This summer, Anisha Bhanot ’13, Marla Marquez ’14 and Bridget Fitzpatrick ’13 conducted research on two serotonin receptor subtypes in male rats with regard to how different drugs affect each type of receptor. They worked under Douglas Weldon, the Stone Professor of Psychology and director of the Neuroscience Program.

Douglas Weldon, the Stone Professor of Psychology, presented a poster at the International Brain Research Organization’s (IBRO) Eighth World Congress of Neuroscience on July 15, in Florence, Italy. “Effects of Anpirtoline Administration on Acoustic Startle Responses and Sensorimotor Gating in Rats” presented three experiments based on initial work by the poster’s co-author Caroline Briggs ’10 for her senior thesis in neuroscience.

The formation of a synapse, the junction between nerve cells, is one of the most the most important and critical stages of nervous system development, and in many cases improper synapse formation is the underlying cause of neurological disease.  The Lehman Lab has discovered a new gene that appears to encode an enzyme that is expressed as synapses develop in invertebrate and vertebrate nervous systems. This summer four students are working to synthesize four different enzymes to explore the function of this novel gene product.

Language is undoubtedly a fundamental aspect of many human interactions. For this reason, the study of language serves a vital purpose in neuroscience, medicine, and even everyday life. Sarah Kane ’12 and Amanda O’Brien ’13 are spending their summer researching language and the brain under Assistant Professor of Psychology Jeremy Skipper. The group is working to disprove the classical model of language processing and to discover more about how language is processed in the human brain.

The human brain reacts differently to emotional cues depending on which hemisphere is processing them. By exploring  hemisphere  reactions to varying  stimuli, these two student researchers hope to unmask some of the brain's mysteries.

Recent Hamilton graduate Caitlyn Williams ’11 is thrilled to be entering into a position with the  Community HealthCorps Program, a division of AmeriCorps later this summer as a school-based health center coordinator. Williams will be working with Open Door Family Medical Center in the medically underserved community of Port Chester, New York.