Broader Impact!

It is crunch time for submitting my revised NSF grant. Yesterday and today, I have been working on my Impact Statement which describes how receiving the NSF grant will enable me to have a broader impact in science and the public interest beyond the actual research objectives of the grant. I have been compiling a list of former students to demonstrate that students working in my lab do go on to be highly successful after graduating from Wofford. I hope you find this data as interesting as I did. 

1. Over the last 9 years as a faculty member at Wofford, 52 students have conducted research under my mentoring in my lab. That's an average of almost 6 students a year!
2. Every psychology major is required to conduct a research thesis during their senior year, therefore a majority (but only slight) of student researchers in my lab are seniors (52%) and thus have limited research exposure. However, of my 52 student researchers 10% were freshmen, 15% were sophomores, and 23% were juniors when they started working in the lab. Many of these underclass students continued to work in the lab for multiple semesters.
3. 68% or 30 of 52 student researchers have gone on to graduate school in fields such as neuroscience PhD (3), medicine (8), health-related professions (6), clinical PhD or counseling (11), and 1 student went to law school and another received her masters in history. Pretty impressive!

Do you want to be the next greatest success story? If so, contact me to learn how you can get invovled in my lab's research!

Students present at National Conference

Molly McGinnis & Lindsey Richardson present their research on benzodiazepine effects on rat licking in long-term tests at the 2009 Association for Chemorecption Sciences (AChemS) conference in Sarasota, FL.  Research was conducted in Dr. Pittman's laboratory at Wofford College.

Students present their research

Wofford College students, Liz Miller, Molly McGinnis, and Lindsey Richardson present their research to faculty and students at a science research symposium held at Wofford College.

To the right, Molly & Lindsey answer questions from the audience.

Current Students in the Lab

From left to right: Molly McGinnis ('09), Brittney Getz ('10), Amanda Ruscin ('09), Mazi Alimohamed ('09), Liz Miller ('09), and Lindsey Richardson ('09). These students are conducting a massive experiment to measure the effects of benzodiazepines on the licking responses to low, medium, and high concentrations of a variety of tastants. Data collection is complete. We are now in the midst of data analysis of the licking patterns.

Comming soon to a blog near you.

This blog will go active once we recieve funding for our collaborative project to investigate how benzodiazepine drugs (anti-anxiety meds) act to alter taste responses in a manner that increases consumption of food. It will be an easy way for members of each lab to update their daily progress on various projects.