Union College Renovation Project for Faculty and Undergraduate Research Facility

Union College, Schenectady NY

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This project will renovate outdated laboratory space on the third floor of Butterfield Hall on the campus of Union College to create a Center for Neuroscience. The Center for Neuroscience will co-locate the neuroscience faculty research labs, enabling the core faculty to run their research program more effectively and share scientific resources more efficiently. An anticipated outcome of the enhanced facilities is increased interactions between neuroscience program faculty with each other and with students as well as collaborative research opportunities with student and faculty in the computer science, electrical and mechanical engineering, and bioengineering programs which are adjacent to the new Center's location. Faculty in the renovated labs will conduct research and research training in areas of neuroplasticity, human cognitive abilities and behavioral dispositions, gender differences in spatial cognition, cognitive genetics, neural control of behavior, and basic molecular mechanisms underlying neurological disorders. Research techniques to be enabled by the Center include intracellular recording and dye injection of individual neurons, high-seed analysis of flight behavior, behavioral methodologies, neuroimaging, and electrophysiological techniques. Examples of research activities proposed for the new Center for Neuroscience include elucidating brain changes, i.e. neuroplasticity, that are involved in acquiring a new cognitive skill, understanding the individual differences in human cognitive abilities and the neural mechanisms that underlie them, investigating the neural control of behavior in flying insects to understand the structure and function of neurons involved in visual control of stable flight, and studying the basic molecular mechanisms underlying specific neurological disorders. With the new Center for Neuroscience, the College's students will have access to cutting-edge, technologically advanced, and diverse research opportunities that are usually only available to graduate students and post-doctoral research staff as much larger institutions. The Center will enable the College to accommodate the growing research and research training needs of the neuroscience interdisciplinary program, which was created in response to student demand in 2003. Additionally, the renovated research facility is expected to be used by participants of Union's Summer Science Workshop, a program for rising high school students traditionally underrepresented in the sciences and those facing economic disadvantages.