Partnership with Rockefeller University Offers Stern Students Graduate-Level Study in Neurobiology As a child, Geulah Ben-David joked that her brain was the most-used muscle in her body. As a psychology major with a concentration in neuroscience at Stern College for Women, she’s learning why.

Ben-David is taking a new neurobiology laboratory course at Stern, which developed through a partnership with Rockefeller University. The course is led by Richard Hunter, a research associate at Rockefeller, and makes use of lab space at both Stern College and Rockefeller to grant students hands-on experience in graduate-level research. “It’s 80 percent experiment-oriented,” said Dr. Hunter. “I guide the class through everything from dissecting sheep brains in our neuroanatomy module to studying the effects of caffeine in rats as we look at psychostimulants.” The new lab was developed as part of an expanding neuroscience curriculum at Stern, which now includes a neuroscience concentration in both the biology and psychology departments and another new course, Behavioral Neuroendocrinology, whose focus is hormonal influence on the brain and behavior. “Understanding the brain and what makes us function as people gets to the core of who we are,” said Lauren Harburger, an assistant professor of psychology at Stern, who teaches that course and helped design the neuroscience-psych concentration. “To learn about even a single cell behind that process is fascinating. It’s something that really challenges and excites students.” The partnership with Rockefeller offers undergraduate Stern students the unique opportunity to study behavior in animals, which in many cases is only available in graduate school. As research interns in his laboratory last fall, many of the neurobiology students have had the chance to observe Dr. Hunter’s animals before. He hopes the students will continue to work with him through the summer and pursue other research at Rockefeller in addition to their work at Stern. At the same time, he seeks to prepare them for the sophisticated challenges they will encounter in graduate school.

“In most undergraduate courses, someone knows the answer to the questions you’re asking, but in grad school, no one does,” said Hunter. “You have to be very critical about how you’re setting up your procedures and to understand that because you’re the first person doing this, you’ll make mistakes. I want my students to know how to learn from those mistakes.” Ben-David agreed with this observation. “When you walk into these labs, the textbook falls apart.” However, she finds that exhilarating. “That’s what I love about the work we’re doing. When you’re creative and innovative, you can make new discoveries. You feel like you’re searching the unknown and nothing is impossible.” Along with another student in the course, Arielle Blum, Ben-David is also a member of the first cohort of Jewish Foundation for the Education of Women (JFEW) Science Fellows at Stern. The JFEW fellowship funds the women’s undergraduate education and provides them with unique training and research opportunities to prepare them for advanced scientific careers. For Ben-David, that may include further exploration of the neuroscience frontier. “Right now, I’m most interested in what keeps people happy or engaged in life,” she said. “What about our thought processes can be used to keep us healthy and motivated in a balanced and constant way? I think the answer probably boils down to how some people’s brains work. If we can figure out how to share that with everyone, that would be really cool.”