Tulane University’s neuroscience major celebrated its 25th anniversary this Friday, welcoming back graduates and professors for a day of reminiscing.
The major came into existence in 2000 by popular demand, with a surge of designed majors in neuroscience appearing in the late 1990s. After its founding as an official program – the third of its kind in the country – the undergraduate major quickly grew to be one of the most popular and successful at the university, with 1,848 total graduates as of this year.
Friday’s festivities were organized and emceed by three of the major’s founding members: Beth Wee, director of the undergraduate and master’s programs in neuroscience, Jeffrey Tasker, Catherine and Hunter Pierson Chair in Neuroscience and Gary Dohanich, professor emeritus.
When asked what aspect of the program they were most proud of, Wee and Dohanich said the same thing: how large the program has become.
“I couldn’t even have guessed the number,” Dohanich said. “When I first saw that graph, I actually went through and added them all up myself to be sure that was actually accurate, because it just seemed like a really, really high number.”
Wee attributes the size of the major to its inherently collaborative nature.
“It started out more [psychology] and [cell and molecular biology], but then we’ve got people from [biomedical engineering], we’ve got people from liberal arts, we’ve got people from the med school … There’s been this real interdisciplinary program long before interdisciplinary was a cool thing,” Wee said.
The day’s speakers, which included researchers in the private sector, nonprofit workers, physicians and college professors from other institutions, were a testament to the diversity of the people that the major attracts. A throughline of the talks was that close relationships between students and faculty have always been a pillar of the neuroscience program, no matter how much it has grown.
“The unique thing about Tulane for me is that I was able to interact face to face, almost one on one if I wanted, with world class neuroscientists,” Ardalan Minokadeh, a graduate of the class of 2003 who subsequently received MD and Ph.D. degrees from Tulane, said. “The faculty … are still as motivated, if not more, than they were when I was here 25 years ago.”
The event was also, in part, a recognition of Beth Wee, one of the program’s first and most motivated faculty, who will be retiring at the end of the semester.
“It’s actually Dr. Beth Wee’s Brain and Behavior course that I took – it changed so many lives, and mine included – that shifted my trajectory,” Minokadeh said.
Looking to the future, Wee said, “if I could wave my magic wand, I would hope that we could get future students really doing state of the art stuff, whether it’s more AI, whether it’s more molecular biology, whether it’s more computational [neuroscience] … that we can really make sure that we’re training students for the 21st century.”
Dohanich echoed Wee’s sentiment about the promise of artificial intelligence and novel computational approaches to studying the brain:
“I think it’s going to be possible to actually begin to delve into complexity, understanding levels we never imagined before … I think it’s going to change also in terms of how we teach neuroscience. I remember years ago, I would say to students … in the future, 50 years from now, I’ll be able to walk you into this hologram of a brain, and we could walk around, and we could point out different things. I think that that is going to be a possibility.”
The neuroscience program’s teaching capacity will soon increase again, with two new full-time faculty members to begin in the fall.
