Dr. Robin Cooper is the Associate Director of the Neuroscience B.S. Program at UK and a highly-respected educator. He teaches Neuroscience and Biology students in a laboratory-based class, BIO 446 Neurophysiology, each year and designs the student's experiments to be novel enough to publish in scientific journals. His long-standing committment to helping undergraduate students publish in scientific journal has produced many such papers. As Dr. Cooper explains,
"The class projects we use in Bio446 (neurophysiology lab) have been exciting not only for the students but also for me as an instructor as I see 1st hand the excitement of the class working together as well as the students being excited in working on novel research projects. The past students have reported back how the class projects have been conversations during their medical school and other professional school interviews. They say they interviewers are impressed on how well they knew the content and the process of publishing research. We have been able to publish around 11 papers with all the students as authors and over 50 abstracts presented at various meetings (internationally, nationally and local)."
A sample of scientific papers published by Dr. Cooper and his undergraduate students from Fall of 2020 is below:
Nethery, B., Abou El-Ezz, M., Brown, C., Calderaro, T., Evans, C., Grant, T., Hazelett, R., High, C., Buendia Castillo, D., Ilagan, T., Klier, J., Marguerite, N., Marino, F., McCubbin, S., Meredith, N., Naidugari, J., Russell, W., Sommers, N., and Cooper, R.L. (2021) The effects of Riluzole on sensory and motor nerve function. IMPULSE. This was a Bio446 class project for Fall 2020. https://impulse.appstate.edu/articles/2020/effects-riluzole-sensory-and-motor-nerve-function [PDF]This was a Bio446 class project for Fall 2020.
McCubbin, S., Abou El-Ezz, M., Brown, C., Calderaro, T., Evans, C., Grant, T., Hazelett, R., High, C., Buendia Castillo, D., Ilagan, T., Klier, J., Marguerite, N., Marino, F., Meredith, N., Naidugari, J., Nethery, B., Russell, W., Sommers, N., and Cooper, R.L. (2021) The effects of Levetiracetam on glutamatergic synaptic transmission. IMPULSE. This was a Bio446 class project for Fall 2020. https://impulse.appstate.edu/articles/2020/effects-levetiracetam-glutamatergic-synaptic-transmission [PDF] This was a Bio446 class project for Fall 2020.
Naidugari, J., Abou El-Ezz, M., Brown, C., Calderaro, T., Evans, C., Grant, T., Hazelett, R., High, C., Buendia Castillo, D., Ilagan, T., Klier, J., Marguerite, N., Marino, F., McCubbin, S., Meredith, N., Nethery, B., Russell, W., Sommers, N., Dupont-Versteegden, E.E., Krall, R., Sharp, K., Chalfant, J., Brown, M, and Cooper, R.L. (2022) Temperature dependence on the passive effects of K+ on membrane potential of skeletal muscle as an educational module. Article ?. In: McMahon K, editor. Tested studies for laboratory teaching. Volume 42. Proceedings of the 41st Conference of the Association for Biology Laboratory