Nature of the Program

The Integrative Neuroscience Area in the Department of Psychology is part of a large and very active neuroscience community on the University of Maryland College Park Campus. Our faculty are among the 60 members of the Neural and Cognitive Sciences Program (NACS), which is a multi-department, multi-college collaboration. NACS offers courses, sponsors a major seminar series, and fosters interactions among scientists working in many areas of the neural sciences across the campus. Our Integrative Neuroscience faculty and their students have ongoing collaborative projects, with labs in Biology, Electrical Engineering, Animal and Avian Sciences, to name only a few. Graduate students who are studying with Integrative neuroscience faculty have the option of receiving their degree from either the Psychology Department or from the NACS Program.

A major strength of our campus is an exceptional concentration of specialists in comparative neuroscience (including neuroethology) and in various aspects of auditory neuroscience. The National Institutes of Health has recognized this strength by funding a training grant in the Comparative and Evolutionary Biology of Hearing. The training grant provides support for several graduate students and postdoctoral fellows and sponsors an annual conference on audition that has drawn prominent auditory scientists from around the world. The most recent conference brought together the faculty, students, and postdoctoral fellows from Georgetown University and UMCP for two days of platform presentations, posters, and informal discussions on auditory neuroscience and the evolution of acoustic communication.

The Integrative Neuroscience Area also is part of the extensive network of neuroscientists in the Baltimore-Washington area. Our faculty and students have active, ongoing research programs with colleagues at Johns Hopkins University, George Mason University, Georgetown University, and James Madison University. An important part of scientific activity is attendance at scientific meetings and conferences where students can present their own research as well as learning about the latest research findings in their own and related fields. We consider it an essential part of graduate-student training to attend national and international meetings. In recent years, students from the Integrative Neuroscience Area have presented their work at major conferences in England, Italy, and Germany, as well as a number of meetings throughout North America.

Neuroscience is truly an international discipline. Thus, the Integrative Neuroscience faculty have strong ties to laboratories in Germany, Denmark, New Zealand, Israel, and Italy; we frequently have foreign scientists visiting our laboratories and our own students have the opportunity to travel to foreign laboratories to learn techniques and to work on collaborative projects.

Faculty

Faculty members in the Integrative Neuroscience specialty include Robert Dooling, William Hodos, Cynthia Moss, and David Yager.

Robert J. Dooling (Professor) recieved his Ph.D. in 1975 from St Louis University. Dr. Dooling's laboratory of Comparative Psychoacoustics involves studies of hearing, vocal communication, and vocal development in birds. He uses primarily psychophysical procedures and other behavioral techniques to understand acoustic communication. Recent work has described vocal development in budgerigars, the sensitivity of the avian auditory system to time and frequency cues, the recovery of hearing following hair cell regeneration in the avian inner ear, the perception of speech sounds by birds, and models of complex sound processing by the avian inner ear.

William Hodos (Professor) received his Ph.D. in 1960 from the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Hodos' laboratory investigates the vision of birds by studying the optics of their eyes, the anatomy and physiology if their retinas and the neurons and pathways of their central visual system. These approaches are combined with psychophysical studies of avian vision to gather a better understanding of how these animals process visual information.

Cynthia Moss (Professor) received her Ph.D. in 1986 from Brown University. Dr. Moss's laboratory studies auditory information processing, spatial perception and sensorimotor integration in vertebrates, using the echolocating bat as a model system. The echolocating bat presents an excellent model system for this line of research, because this animal actively probes the environment with the acoustic signals that guide its behavior. Research in the lab utilizes behavioral, neurophysiological, and computational methods.

David D. Yager (Associate Professor) received his Ph.D. in 1989 from Cornell University. Dr. Yager's laboratory does research on the evolution of auditory systems. Their experiments use insects as model systems to trigger and guide escape behaviors specifically, how flying insects evade capture by bats.