Neuroscience

The Neuroscience program at U of G has been pivotal in my personal and academic development. Courses like Behavioural Neuroscience II, where I handled a sheep's brain, and Functional Mammalian Neuroanatomy, with its in-depth study of human structures, offered invaluable hands-on experiences. As an international student at U of G, I initially faced challenges adjusting to life in Canada. However, the university's robust support system, including counselling services and health resources, helped ease this transition. Overall, the program's unique blend of theory and practical application, combined with the university's wealth of resources, has equipped me with confidence, problem-solving skills, and the ability to present myself professionally.

The Neuroscience program was flexible enough to give me the opportunity to acquire statistics and data analysis skills. These skills were pivotal in getting research experience and have kept a lot of career doors open. I leveraged my statistics experience to work in a lab in my 3rd year, which led to a 4th year thesis project and eventually graduate school working with the same professor.

Like most students, I began my undergraduate degree with little direction in mind for my future career path. However, I learned that the Neuroscience program is designed to provide students with diverse experiential learning opportunities, ranging from small classes with passionate professors to brain anatomy dissection labs. This exposure allowed me to narrow down my interests and create meaningful one-on-one connections with professors who helped mentor me, shaping my direction toward pursuing a Master's in Neuroscience.

My favourite thing about the Neuroscience program is that it’s interdisciplinary, so we’re approaching the subject in many different ways. We look at psychology, so you take into account the mind and personality, and we also approach it from a clinical perspective, learning about the parts of the brain and what each part does. We take a wide variety of courses, including molecular biology and genetics, cellular biology, statistics, chemistry, so we get a really broad understanding.

I’ve found Guelph’s Neuroscience program, along with its unique exposure to research, to be incredibly engaging. While independence is encouraged, the professors are very supportive and make themselves available when needed. In my experience, personal relationships with the teaching teams develop naturally simply by asking questions and being interested in the material. Progressing through the major’s variety of courses has founded my fascination with the field of psychiatric disorders.

Neuroscience at Guelph is unique in the sense that we have so many researchers on campus so it isn’t just learning in class, you can work with professors in their labs. I love that we get to work hands-on. It’s not just listening but also applying what you’ve learned.

Throughout the day, we are bombarded by far more visual information than our finite brains can process. Nevertheless, we are able to use this visual information to successfully guide complex behaviours like driving a car, playing a sport, or spotting anomalies on a medical scan. In the Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, our aim is to understand how these impressive abilities are achieved.

The primary goals of the Bent Neurophysiology Lab research program are 1) To understand the individual and integrative roles of somatosensory (both tactile and proprioceptive) and vestibular inputs in successful movement and equilibrium, and 2) To understand how to effectively enhance sensory contributions to improve perception, movement and equilibrium.

My lab investigates the molecular, cellular, and genetic mechanisms involved in chronic pain development and maintenance. Research focuses on the intersection of pain and emotion, and bridges animal models of chronic pain with molecular biology and systems neuroscience to enhance our understanding of chronic pain, mental health, and circuit-wide gene function.

Dr. Mazyar Fallah and members of his lab use systems and cognitive neuroscience approaches to understand: how attention works; how features are integrated across multiple brain areas to form object representations; how attention and object representations drive eye movements; multisensory processing including auditory/visual and visual/proprioceptive; how the visual system prioritizes peripersonal space (the area within reach of our arms); the networks in the brain perform those processes, using neuroimaging (EEG); how these networks (EEG) are impaired due to damage, such as concussion and subconcussive impacts; how athletics/exercise improve cognitive processing.

Research in the Cognitive-Affective Neuroscience Lab combines neuroimaging and psychophysiology techniques with studies of human thought and behaviour to examine factors that are critical for healthy cognitive and emotional functioning.

In the Memory and Cognition Lab, we have been pursuing many different research projects that aim to advance our understanding of human memory, learning, and cognition more broadly. Research in our lab incorporates various methodologies including behavioural testing, and psychophysiological measures such as heart rate, skin conductance, facial electromyography, and pupillometry.

The Lalonde Lab uses a multidisciplinary approach to understand brain development, neuroplasticity, and the molecular basis of psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Research conducted in the Addiction, Interoception, and Motivation Laboratory (AIM Lab) investigates the behaviour-altering effects of drugs of abuse. We use a variety of experimental procedures including self-administration and Pavlovian conditioning to study and manipulate the stimulus and reinforcing properties of drugs.

In the NeuroPalm Lab, we are interested in how the protein lipid modification palmitoylation governs protein trafficking and function in neurons. We use a variety of molecular and cellular biology techniques such as CRISPR-mediated gene knockout and mutation, shRNA-mediated knockdown and rescue, confocal microscopy, and specialized palmitoylation assays in primary rodent neuronal cultures and human iPSC-derived neurons.

Research in the Scott Lab focuses on the inter- and intra-cellular relationships of glial cells and neurons responsible for maladaptive changes that underlie neurological disorders.

My lab seeks to map and understand the gene regulatory networks that control the fate of stem cells and their derivatives. Using a breadth of computational and empirical methods, we are taking a multi-species comparative approach to understand how changes in DNA sequence affect gene regulation and contribute to evolution. We also leverage our core expertise in gene regulation to study the underlying mechanisms of inherited neurological disorders with a goal discovering genetic and epigenetic changes with diagnostic value, and developing treatment strategies for what are presently untreatable disorders.

In the Neurobiology of Cognition Laboratory, we study the neural bases of cognitive functions such as learning, memory, attention, and perception, taking an interdisciplinary approach to animal models of basic mechanisms and their applications to human mental disorders.