*** I received alternative funding for the Fall 2022 semester and unfortunately had to turn down the opportunity to teach the third iteration of my FWS course. I hope to have the opportunity to teach this course sometime in the near future. For more information on Cornell's FWS courses offered through the Knight Institute, see here.***

Course Description: 

What are the neural bases of human thoughts, emotions, and cognition? How do natural selection and ecological challenges shape cognitive adaptations over deep evolutionary time, and can this knowledge be harnessed to better understand our own modern psychology? This writing course will introduce students to core concepts in neurobiology and evolution while developing critical writing and composition skills pertinent to communicating within the natural science disciplines. Using popular science readings and the primary literature, students will explore the bases of brain-behavior relationships and how certain human cognitive capacities may logically arise from ancient brain structures. Through written opinion and analyses of such topics, students will improve their ability to interpret and communicate scientific research while simultaneously learning to construct persuasive arguments in their own writing.

Course Rationale:

This course is designed to mature students’ skills as writers through engagement with questions surrounding the evolution of cognitive abilities. Considering humans from a comparative evolutionary perspective can help us to better understand the incremental emergence of cognition over deep evolutionary timescales. From the last universal common ancestor to the modern human brain, students will encounter a cast of characters both living and extinct to elucidate mental abilities shared across species. We will also investigate how technology intersects with modern human cognitive capacities, and will speculate on how that relationship may develop in the future. A major emphasis will be placed on teaching students about the relationship between data and writing in the scientific process, as well as on exposing students to the most prevalent forms of written communication within the STEM disciplines. Students will both read and produce various forms of scholarly writing, including but not limited to: cogent expository prose, descriptive natural history observations, research press releases, and academic literature reviews. Students will also learn to use existing academic literature to generate novel scientific questions, hypotheses, and predictions about a topic related to their personal scientific or career interests, which will be included in an original research grant proposal submitted at the end of the semester.

Course Units & Modules:

• Unit 1: Writing Assessment - Contemplating the Nature of Knowledge

  • Course Introduction & Goals - The Neural Basis of Knowledge / A gene's eye view of evolution

• Unit 2: Scholarly writing and the process of peer review - Write to think, think to write

  • Ancient Structures I: Neurons and the need for speed

  • Ancient Structures II: The basal ganglia / What to do and when to do it

  • Ancient Structures III: A central role for dopamine / Untangling reward from motivation

  • Ancient Structures IV: Emotions, pleasure, and pain

• Unit 3: Analyzing and summarizing arguments - What do you want to say?

  • Deep Origins I: From LUCA to mammals

  • Deep Origins II: From the mammalian LCA to the primate LCA

  • Deep Origins III: Maternal bonds, pair bonds, and friendships (a.k.a. evolution is lazy!)

• Unit 4: Science communication - Who is your audience?

  • Primates I: The neocortex and primate brain specializations

  • Primates II: Behavioral specializations / Social structures of the great apes

  • Primates III: Hominin evolution / What's language got to do with it? 

• Unit 5: Grant writing techniques - The reward of generating new knowledge

  • Human Cognition I: Tragedies of the broken mind / Habits, addiction, and suffering

  • Human Cognition II: Cognition and consciousness

  • Human Cognition III: The future of neuroscience / Practical lessons from a neuroepistemic worldview

Course Description: Laboratory-oriented course designed to teach the concepts and tools of cellular neurophysiology through hands-on experience with extracellular and intracellular electrophysiological techniques, and computer acquisition and analysis of laboratory results. Students explore signal transmission in the nervous system by examining the cellular basis of resting and action potentials, and synaptic transmission and optogenetic control of behavior and physiology. Lecture time is used to review nervous system physiology, introduce laboratory exercises, discuss lab results and primary research papers, and for presentation of additional experimental preparations and methods. Invertebrate preparations are used as model systems.

Student Outcomes:

• Students should understand the contemporary experimental paradigms in modern neurophysiology and become technically competent with the extracellular and intracellular recording techniques used to explore nervous system physiology.

• Students should deepen their understanding of the ionic mechanisms underlying neuronal excitability and synaptic communication in the nervous system.

• Students should develop their skills in communicating scientific results effectively through written lab reports and oral presentations.

• Students should refine their critical reading skills of primary scientific literature.

• Students should refine their ability to develop testable hypotheses, and develop independent scientific thinking.

Selected Topics: 

• Introduction to Electrophysiological Instrumentation and Recording

• Neuronal Simulations

• Extracellular Recordings of the Crayfish Superficial Flexor System

• Action Potential Conduction

• Intracellular Recordings and the Ionic Basis of the Resting Potential

• Neuromodulation

• Synaptic Transmission

• Synaptic Plasticity

• Optogenetics & Fluorescence Imaging

• Evolutionary Neuroscience

Course Description: This course provides hands-on experience with modern methods for studying animal behavior both in the field and in the laboratory. Class projects will be complemented with a series of workshops and demonstrations of methods. Topics include: experimental design, animal tracking, animal color analysis, sound analysis, chemical analysis, capture/marking methods, determining relatedness, measuring social behavior, and behavioral statistics in R.

Student Outcomes:

• Provide students with hands-on experience in designing experiments to test hypotheses about animal behavior that they have heard about in lecture courses.

• Provide students with hands-on experience designing field and lab studies with the eventual statistics in mind and then using those statistics on data they themselves have gathered.

• Expose students to a diversity of devices and techniques for animal behavior research including tracking, color measurement, sound recording and analysis, video recording and analysis, and olfactory signal analysis.

• Provide students with detailed mentoring and feedback on the writing of scientific reports based on their own data and analyses.

• Expose students to the excitement and appeal of field and lab research on animal behavior.

Selected Topics: 

• Behavioral Scoring

• Demography

• Social Networks

• Phylogenetic Approaches

• RNA Sequencing Approaches

• Population Genomics

Course Description: An introduction to neuroscience: the structure and function of the nervous system of humans and other animals. Topics include the cellular and molecular basis for cell signaling, the functions of neurons in communication and in decision making; neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, sensory systems, motor systems, neural development, learning and memory, and other complex brain functions. The course will emphasize how the nervous system is built during development, how it changes with experiences during life, how it functions in normal behavior, and how it is disrupted by injury and disease. Discussion sections will include a dissection of a preserved sheep brain.

Student Outcomes:

• Demonstrate knowledge of core concepts and principles in neuroscience through writing, speaking, and problem solving.

• Link neuroscience concepts to observations and experiments using the scientific method.

• Categorize the functions of the major components of the central and peripheral nervous system to the extent they are known.

• Apply the laws of chemistry and physics to understanding mechanisms of neural activity.

• Assess how mechanisms of animal and human neural function at multiple scales, from molecules and molecular interactions to interaction of neural circuits and brain pathways.

• Explain how information is encoded by neurons and neural circuits: describe how perceptions are represented, stored, and recalled for later use in decision making and control of behavior.

• Interpret modern views of how the nervous system changes with experience, and how it is disrupted by injury and disease.

• Interpret modern views of how the brain generates complex cognitive function including communication, emotions, sleep and cognition.

Course Description: General introduction to the field of animal behavior. Topics include evolution and behavior, behavioral ecology, sociobiology, chemical ecology, communication, orientation and navigation.

Student Outcomes:

• To develop your awareness of, and curiosity about, the diversity of natural history and the exciting puzzles raised by the behavior of living things.

• To gain mastery at asking and answering questions about the mechanisms and evolution of behavior by performing observations, generating hypotheses, deriving predictions, and developing tests to investigate the causes of behavior.

• To compare the social systems of different species and to understand how the study of behavior is relevant to your other courses, to your own life, and to the world around you.

• To learn to read, interpret and critically evaluate scientific discoveries communicated through the primary, peer-reviewed literature.