Answer life-altering questions and solve real-world problems with renowned scientists.
Neuroscience seeks to answer questions that touch on nearly every aspect of life, including motivation, eating, sleeping, memory, sensing, movement, and maintaining health.
Through the Research Scholars program and a major in neuroscience, you’ll work with renowned neuroscientists to explore how the brain works.
Get an Early Start
Unlike other neuroscience students, you will have the opportunity to participate in research as early as your first year. You may also have the chance to become an author on research publications. You gain advanced research experience that can help you win grants, scholarships, and entry to the graduate school of your choice.
Research Opportunities
The Research Scholars program arranges for you to participate in research with some of WSU’s top faculty members. Research opportunities might include projects like these:
- Memory and drug rehabilitation:
It’s well known that drug addicts who go to rehab often relapse upon returning to familiar surroundings. You could use optogenetic technology, a highly precise way of studying controlled events in specific cells, to investigate how memories triggered by environmental cues influence the relapse process. - Hunger and satiation:
How do you know when you’re hungry or full? Is it the brain or the gut that decides? You could explore connections between the brain and gut at many levels, from single neurons to the whole animal or person. - Stress, sleep, and health:
Stress interrupts your sleep. Disrupted sleep can lead to health problems, including development of metabolic syndrome, increased risk of heart disease, higher incidences of certain types of cancer, disrupted immune responses, and increased risk of suffering from a major depressive syndrome. You could explore how stress changes sleep, and how sleep affects different aspects of health. - Treating Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases:
Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease are increasingly prevalent in the U.S. as the population ages. You could investigate a new drug that may work to reverse the symptoms of these two disorders.
Benefits of research
Doing undergraduate research through the Research Scholars program offers you the chance to delve deeply into the topics that fascinate you. Additional benefits of research include:
- Networking opportunities with fellow students, faculty, and industry professionals
- Preparation for graduate school
- Access to paid summer research opportunities
- A competitive edge in job searches (Research looks good to employers.)
- Access to advanced research technology and instrumentation
- A more detailed understanding of your major
With a degree in neuroscience, your career path could include graduate school, medical school, employment in the biotechnology or medical devices industries, teaching, or professional training in veterinary medicine, optometry, or other fields.
Work with Top Faculty
Top faculty members in neuroscience are dedicated to helping you and your fellow Research Scholars achieve their goals.
“Faculty in our program genuinely care about students and their success, and they demonstrate that with the time they spend teaching and mentoring, as well as with their availability to students. If students want to meet with our faculty, they can send an email, make a phone call, or just walk up to the lab.”
Samantha Gizerian, Associative Professor and Associate Director for Undergraduate Studies, Department of Integrative Physiology and Neuroscience; Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, College of Veterinary Medicine