By Madison Dyment

One of the most rewarding aspects of higher education is the chance to train the next generation of leaders and workers. Every so often, students are lucky enough to find opportunities that go above and beyond to give them practical experience in preparing them for their future. Mark Prendergast’s BIO 199 class is one of those opportunities.

Prendergast’s class is designed for freshmen neuroscience majors. The course is part of the STEMCats Living Learning Program at the University of Kentucky in the College of Arts and Sciences, with its students either in that program or the Lewis Honors College. There are many existing sections of the course, each being taught by a different faculty member who conducts different types of research related to biology.

The STEMCats Living Learning Program was founded in 2014 and receives funding from a

By Lori Adams

The University of Kentucky has released its Dean's List for the spring 2019 semester. A total of 6,562 students were recognized for their outstanding academic performance. 

To make a Dean’s List in one of the UK colleges, a student must earn a grade-point average of 3.6 or higher and must have earned 12 credits or more in that semester, excluding credits earned in pass-fail classes. Some UK colleges require a 3.5 GPA to make the Dean’s List.

The full Dean's List can be accessed by visiting: www.uky.edu/PR/News/DeansList/.

The University of Kentucky is increasingly the first choice for students, faculty and staff to pursue their passions and their professional goals. In the last two years, Forbes has named UK among the best employers for diversity and

By Loretta Stafford

Childhood friends Zach Major, Kayne Finley, Keagan Finley, and Austin Major

On the heels of graduation, many new alumni look forward to spending the summer traveling, learning about the world and themselves in the process. However, this summer’s travels hold special significance for two spring 2019 UK grads.

Zach Major, a physical therapy student in the University of Kentucky College of Health Sciences who recently graduated with his B.A. in environmental and sustainability studies from the College of Arts and Sciences, and Robby Larson, who earned his degree in neuroscience from the college as well, will join former UK swim team member Keagan Finley on a cross-country bike ride. The team will make “Cannonballs Across America

Psychology and Neuroscience Professors Drs. Lynda Sharrett and Mark Prendergast have been invited to guest edited a special of the neuroscience journal Brain Sciences focused on innovative approaches to teaching neuroscience at the undergraduate level.

Neuroscience is growing globally, as an educational discipline and occupational focus. Recent findings suggest that the impetus for this growth is due to students’ inherent interest in brain-body connections , as well as a recognition that neuroscience, being a multidisciplinary field of study, will provide students with a comprehensive foundation suited for subsequent graduate and professional studies. Teaching undergraduate students in this broad, interdisciplinary field can be challenging and requires integrating instructional techniques from the natural and social sciences, encouraging scientific exploration, and

By Jenny Wells

While most final assignments in science courses involve lab reports or essays, a human anatomy class at the University of Kentucky decided to switch things up this semester by having an art showcase instead.

Nearly a hundred unique works of art, created by students majoring in subjects like neuroscience and biology, adorned the UK College of Nursing Building's auditorium on April 25. Among the art were poems about the blood flow through the human heart, photographs of trees representing the respiratory system, abstract pieces reflecting the processes of neurodegenerative diseases, collages of the digestive system (including one made from print UK advertisements), and depictions of the human kidney created from a variety of materials including foods, plastics and plants.

April Hatcher, an associate professor of neuroscience, describes herself

The 2018-2019 Neuroscience Major Graduating Scholars are LIsted Below:

Each of the students listed below satisfied the following Scholars requirements for outstanding scholarship, which include:

Obtaining a minimum GPA of 3.5 A 6 credit hour independent research experience A scientific presentation at a conference, including one on campus or nationally. Complete two scholars courses or two 400G*,500 or 600** level or a combination of a scholars course and a 400G/ 500/600 BIO course.

Daniel Ma  Aaron Silverstein

Heather Burns  Isaiah Brown

Jessica Ryan  Hayley Baker

Leah Terry   Abigail Samson

Esther Putman  Cassidy Carter

Reeya Khanal  Sneha Rajan

Haley Fluharty

Rebecca Buster

Alysia Kohlbrand

Jessica Ryan 

Manish Bhojwani

Allison Spears

By Whitney Hale, Ellie Wnek and Hannah Edelen

Senior Dealla Samadi discovered a missing piece of the book "La Reine Albemarle," which was published posthumously without the segment. Her discovery has led to an article published in a French philosophy journal.

Seven interns in the University of Kentucky Libraries' Special Collections Research Center (SCRC) Learning Lab will represent UK at the second World Conference of Undergraduate Research (World CUR).

These students will travel to Oldenburg, Germany, May 23-25, to present their research, discuss global issues and create an international research partnership. Funding for their travel is provided through the 

Chemistry Professor and Neuroscientist Dr. D. Allan Butterfield has published a paper, with collegue Dr. Barry Halliwell from the University of Singapore, in the #1 ranked  neuroscience journal in the world.

The publication, entitled "Oxidative stress, dysfunctional glucosemetabolism and Alzheimer disease", was published in the March 2019 issue of the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

By Ryan Girves

The University of Kentucky Chellgren Center for Undergraduate Excellence honored the 2018 class of Chellgren Fellows and announced five Chellgren Endowed Professorships at an event that took place Saturday, April 20. 

The Chellgren Center works to advance UK's commitment to student, teaching and program excellence. Created in 2005 with a gift from Paul Chellgren, a UK graduate, and his family, the Chellgren Center creates unique educational opportunities for outstanding undergraduate students and professors at the university. Chellgren's commitment to undergraduate education at UK has created a countless number of opportunities for UK students, staff and faculty, impacting thousands.  

Psychology/Neuroscience Professors Mark Fillmore and Mark Prendergast received a 5-year,  $1.7 million grant from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to train the next generation of scientists who study alcohol. These funds will support 5 outstanding graduate students conducting basic or applied alcohol research from across UK's campus. Each student will be supported for a period of 2 years. This funding, from an arm of the National Institutes of Health, is tax payer funded. At UK, we have the ability to study alcohol use, its risk factors and consequences at many levels of analysis and to integrate those findings in a collaborative manner to address our shared goals of better understanding risk factors for alcohol abuse, consequences of alcohol abuse and potential treatments of alcohol abuse.

The American Physiological Society awarded two prestigious National awards to graduating Neuroscience major Aaron Silverstein 

Aaron presented his original research on respiration after traumatic CNS injury at the "Experimental Biology" in early April.

After graduation, Aaron will join the UK College of Medicin's M.D./Ph.D. program and will continue his research in the Spinal Cord and Brain Injury Research Center

The autism-related research of UK alum and neuroscientist Dr. Blair Braden was featured recently on social media outlets of the Society for Neuroscience. Blair worked in the lab of Dr. Mark Prendergast many years ago, and attended graduate school at Arizona State University, where she is now a professor.

"Telomere twist: Blair Braden, assistant professor at Arizona State University, and colleagues reported work showing that children with autism have shorter telomeres than their typical peers. The effect is particularly strong in girls with autism. The findings add an interesting twist to the literature on sex differences in autism. More importantly, if shortened telomeres are

By Carol Lea Spence

The University of Kentucky is hosting the third annual Expanding Your Horizons Conference for middle school girls and their parents or guardians from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. EDT Saturday, April 20. This day of hands-on workshops will inform young Kentucky girls and their parents about exciting career opportunities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Women continue to be underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields, and they hold a disproportionately low share of STEM undergraduate degrees, particularly in engineering, according to a study from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

“Many higher education institutions like UK struggle against the problem of poor retention of female undergraduates in a lot of science, engineering and math majors,” said Ellen Crocker, assistant professor in the

Margaret Alice Kennard (September 25, 1899—December 12, 1975) received her doctoral degree in 1930, from Cornell University. She was a neuroscientist who principally studied the effects of neurological damage on primates. Her work led to the creation of the Kennard Principle, which posits a negative linear relationship between age of a brain lesion and the outcome expectancy: in other words, that the earlier in life a brain lesion occurs, the more likely it is for some compensation mechanism to reverse at least some of the lesion's bad effects. She earned a Rockefeller Traveling Fellowship for study in Western Europe from 1934 to 1936. She also studied the effects of stimulants and cortical depressants on monkeys with brain damage.

Goldman-Rakic was the first to discover and describe the circuitry of the prefrontal cortex and its relationship to working memory. Before Goldman-Rakic, scientists thought that the higher cognitive functions of the prefrontal cortex were beyond the scope of scientific study. Goldman-Rakic's research showed that methods employed to study the sensory cortices could be adapted to the highest order prefrontal cortical areas, revealing the circuit basis for higher cognitive function.[10] Because of Goldman-Rakic, scientists began to better understand the neurobiological basis of higher cognitive function, and of such disorders as schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, 

Dr. Marian Diamond (1926-2017) was a Professor of Integrative Biology at the  University of California, Berkley. Among her remarkable contributions to neuroscience include the first demonstration that brains can physically change their structure in response to experience, coining the term "neuroplasticity". Dr. Diamond also famously studied the brain of Albert Einstein in the 1980's and demonstrated that Einstein's  brain had a larger concentration of glia than most.

For a fascinating read about Dr. Diamond's career, visit

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jul/30/marian-diamond-neurosci…

Organizers of Expanding Your Horizons are looking for University of Kentucky students who are interested in being workshop leaders for the 2019 conference. Expanding Your Horizons is a one-day conference on April 20 for middle school girls from across Kentucky. The purpose is to expose them to the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics by taking part in hands-on science workshops.

Women make up only 24 percent of the STEM workforce, and women hold a disproportionately low share of STEM undergraduate degrees.

“Many times, girls lack role models in those fields, so they may not realize the variety of career options and opportunities that exist for women,” said Ellen Crocker, a conference organizer and postdoctoral scholar in the UK Department of Forestry and Natural Resources.

Expanding Your Horizons addresses that

By Eliana Shapere

Natasha Boelstler, a junior majoring in neuroscience and minoring in German, has always been an explorer by nature. This wanderlust led her to apply out of state for college, and in 2016 she left her hometown of Detroit to settle in at UK.

“I was drawn to UK because I liked the neuroscience program. There weren’t a lot of colleges that offered neuroscience as a major, just as a minor. UK’s program stuck out to me not only because it was offered as major, but because the program is research based,” Boelstler said. “I hope to become a neurosurgeon, possibly in Germany, and the research aspect is very important to me. In fact, the reason I got involved in research in the first place was because I’m a Chellgren Fellow.”

As a Chellgren Fellow, Boelstler developed her interest in research and learned skills such as how to apply for prestigious

By Jenny Wells

Lauren Hudson's book "The Ascension" charted in the Top 10 on Amazon Kindle in Young Adult Fiction. Her follow-up novel, "The Deception," also charted in the Top 10. Hudson will give a talk at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 13, at the Gatton Student Center.

University of Kentucky student Lauren Hudson is not your typical college freshman — at age 18, she has already authored multiple award-winning books.

"I have been writing since about sixth grade, but I never really knew how much I enjoyed it until a little later," said Hudson, who is majoring in neuroscience in the UK College of Arts and Sciences. "When I was in middle school, my eighth-grade English teacher asked us a write a short story for class. I was so excited about the project

Neuroscientists from the Department of Psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Behavioral Science in the College of Medicine have received an award from the National Institutes of Health to study cocaine use disorder from a new perspective.

Cocaine use disorder (CUD) is marked by the repeated decision to pursue and use cocaine over other available activities and goods. However, lab-based studies to date have not systematically investigated the decision-making processes that underlie the choice to use cocaine. The present translational, multidisciplinary project melds modern mathematical modeling techniques with state-of-the-art neuroscience methods to investigate the neurobehavioral processes that underlie cocaine-associated decision-making in real time. This innovative approach enables