NeuroNews - Oberlin College

faculty and staff activities
Lynne Bianchi, chair and associate professor of neuroscience, began
teaching at Oberlin in 1998. She returned to the department last
fall, having completed her sabbatical and three-year term as associate
dean. She recently took over as coordinator of health career
programs and is working with students and alumni to help prepare
them for different health career professions. When not writing letters
of recommendation, she is involved in other writing projects
related to her work on development of the auditory system.
Mark Braford, professor of biology and neuroscience, has been at
Oberlin since 1986. He had a change of pace during his fall sabbatical
when he worked in his lab with two honors and one research
student. During the spring semester, he taught a record number
of students—47—in Neuroanatomy. In the Neuroanatomy lab
course, he instituted individual projects in which each student
formulated a question and then answered it using our department’s
extensive comparative neuroanatomical slide collection, which
includes the brains of such uncommonly studied animals as the
kinkajou, goat, lynx, porcupine, and flying fox.
Leslie Dowell Kwakye ’06 returned to Oberlin this spring as a visiting
instructor of neuroscience and taught a senior seminar and the introductory
neuroscience laboratory class. She returns next year as a
postdoctoral fellow as part of the Consortium for Faculty Diversity.
Keith Downing is a professor of computer science at the Norwegian
University of Science and Technology. He spent his sabbatical year
at Oberlin and taught a computational neuroscience course called
Adaptive Networks of Knowledge.
Gunner Kwakye was a visiting professor of neuroscience this spring.
He taught neurotoxicology lecture and lab classes and will continue
as a visiting assistant professor next year.
Mike Loose, associate professor of neuroscience, has taught at
Oberlin since 1990. In 2011-12 he revised and taught the NSCI
211 lab, his neurophysiology
course, and his Studies in
Neuronal Function Lab, and
he added a spring senior seminar
to meet the department’s
need. In research, Mike worked
with eight research students on
Faculty member Pat Simen, Alex
Amlie-Wolf ’13, and Matt Hartsock
’12 joined alumni at the Oberlin
neuroscience reunion held at the
Society for Neuroscience meeting in
Washington, DC, in fall 2011.
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two projects. One study looked
at the effects of difficult sensory
discriminations on event-related
potentials, reaction times, and
accuracy rates to see if neural
correlates could be found to
Caitlin Carlton ’12, Jan Thornton,
Kelly Drum ’13, and Leslie
Kwakye at the neuroscience
Welcome Back Games Night this
spring semester.
match the parameters of the
drift diffusion model of decision
making. The other study found
two neural changes, one that
correlated with the use of the
win-stay, lose-shift strategy and
another that predicted when
people would switch choices as
they are making probabilistic
guesses.
Catherine McCormick, professor
of biology and neuroscience,
began teaching at Oberlin in
1986 and received the college’s
2010-11 Teaching Excellence Award. During fall semester 2011
she was on sabbatical and continued her research on auditory input
convergence with central nuclei of the lateral line system. She
was coauthor on two papers and prepared and submitted a manuscript,
now in press, with a former honors student. This spring she
taught her biology class on vertebrate structure and function and
will again teach her animal behavior course in the fall.
Tracie Paine joined the Department of Neuroscience in 2009 as
an assistant professor. This year she taught Neuropharmacology,
Neuropharmacology Laboratory, cotaught The Brain: An
Introduction to Neuroscience, Introductory Neuroscience
Laboratory, and a senior seminar titled Neurobiology of Mental
Illness. In addition she mentored two honors students, with
several additional research students working in the lab. Last fall,
Jonathon Wachtel’11 presented his honors research at the Society
for Neuroscience Annual (SfN) meeting. Geoffrey Diehl and
Joseph Leffler presented their summer research projects at the
Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience poster session.
Patrick Simen joined the department as an assistant professor
in fall 2011. This year he cotaught The Brain: An Introduction
to Neuroscience, Introductory Neuroscience Lab, Cognitive
Neuroscience, and Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. He worked with
research student Billy Broderick during fall 2011 on a model of
sequential adjustment in human perceptual decision-making. His
research interests center on testing behavioral and physiological
predictions of a random-walk model of decision-making and interval
timing in humans and non-human animals.
Jan Thornton, professor of neuroscience, began teaching at
Oberlin in 1990. During the 2011-12 year she was back to teaching
after a productive sabbatical that included the publication
of two research articles, Hormones, Neuroendocrine Research