He could be describing really good parents.
“In the developing brain, we think astrocytes start the formation of new synapses and help them develop,” Chris Risher says of the supporting cells of the nervous system. “In the adult head, they are making sure everything is in working order. The neurons themselves don’t have the machinery to fix problems. Astrocytes are kind of the problem-solvers.”
This graduate student is talking about processes that enable brain cells to swap chemical messengers and people to learn, love, think and do.
“I think it’s really cool that we are figuring out how the brain works at every tiny connection,” Chris says. “We are at the smallest part of the puzzle, the basis of everything else in neuroscience.”
He found astrocytes and his future on the last rotation of his first semester of graduate school at the Medical College of Georgia. Chris couldn’t help but remember Dr. Kristen Harris, director of MCG’s Synapses and Cognitive Neuroscience Center, after her brief presentation to students earlier that semester.
“You get a sense, right off the bat, that she has all these ideas flying out at any given second. She is really enthusiastic about everything she does,” says Chris. She even laid out ideas for students who wanted to spend time in her lab. He was hooked on astrocytes and neuroscience.
Dr. Harris had been similarly hooked years before, deciding as an undergraduate on a neuroscience career. She studied neurobiology with Dr. Timothy Teyler at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine and Kent State University, which had one of the few neuroscience graduate programs in the country at that time.
When the Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar in Synapses and Cognitive Neuroscience came to MCG from Boston University in 2002 to contribute to the growing mass of neuroscientists, she knew a graduate program had to be part of the program. “To do first-class research, we had to have a Ph.D. program. We needed a workforce of people we were educating here who had as their mission to do research.”
Chris is one of the first students in the new program that began this fall, birthed from the enthusiasm of scientists such as Dr. Harris and the clear importance of the system that makes us us.
“The brain is so complex and yet we know very little about it,” says Dr. Deborah Lewis, neuroscientist and director of MCG’s graduate program in neuroscience. “What is consciousness? How can your hormonal cycles change your moods so drastically? How do we think? How do we navigate space? What happens when things go wrong? There are just so many questions. That is why neuroscience research is really blossoming.”
The
brain has recently earned a rightful place as a research bull’s eye
nationwide. The National Institutes of Health declared the 1990s the decade of
the brain, a period that paralleled a doubling of the NIH budget, making
more federal research dollars available for all types of research. The Society
for Neuroscience has grown from 7,000 to 30,000 members since the late 1970s.
Closer to home, the last six years in particular have been a boon for MCG research, with neuroscience named one of five focus areas, along with cancer, cardiovascular disease, infection/inflammation and diabetes/obesity. In 2005, MCG established an Institute of Neuroscience as a magnet and magnifier for studies of the brain, spinal cord and nerves.
“We have more than 80 neuroscientists generating more than $15 million in research funding annually, and we need to coordinate and expand these efforts,” says Dr. Robert K. Yu, director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Institute of Molecular Medicine and Genetics. “I regard training as an important element of success of the neuroscience program. Training is an important element for our future.”
He and his colleague, Dr. Darrell Brann, have contributed significantly to neuroscience and education. Dr. Yu is principal investigator and Dr. Brann co-director on a $1 million, five-year training grant to support three postdoctoral fellows and one graduate student in neurodegenerative diseases and neural repair.
The training grant, which is distinct from the new degree program but dovetails nicely with it, has about 20 faculty members and a Steering Committee that helps select grant recipients and monitor their progress. The highly competitive training grant helps publicize MCG’s programs and attract top-notch students, Dr. Yu says.
“Continued progress in the battle against neurodegenerative diseases requires the development of multidisciplinarily trained neuroscientists who will be well-equipped to attack the myriad and complex nature of neurodegenerative diseases,” he says.
“Neurodegenerative diseases and strokes have an enormous impact on productivity and quality of life for millions of people in the United States. Georgia [part of the infamous Stroke Belt] is especially hard hit. In addition, diabetic neuropathies are particularly prevalent among the African-American population in Georgia,” Dr. Yu says.
These types of unfortunate facts led MCG to build a critical mass of scientists, including a strong cadre of physician-scientists, who study neurodegenerative diseases. That, in turn, led to the institute and now the expanded emphasis on educating future neuroscientists.
“It’s always an experiment when you are trying something for the first time,” says Dr. Brann, who developed several of the courses. He looked at what was already out there, talked to others in the field and thought about what he wanted and needed to learn as a student. “We got outstanding course evaluations,” he says of courses taught for the first time in 2005, including a Web-based version.
His coursework covers topics such as cellular and molecular neuroscience, nervous system development, sensory systems and regulatory systems that control functions such as breathing and metabolism. “Having a great course is what sells students on neuroscience,” Dr. Lewis says.
An unusual aspect of the program is a clinical neuroscience course that complements the strengths of the physician-scientists. “We have all these great clinical people in neurology, radiology, neurosurgery, psychiatry,” says Dr. Lewis. (See A Winning Hand) “We wanted our students to take advantage of our clinical settings. They go into a classroom with medical students and learn about all these neurological and psychiatric disorders. If they are interested in epilepsy, they can choose to shadow physicians like neuroradiologist Jay J. Pillai.” They can move from research facilities such as MCG’s Human Brain Lab to MCG clinical facilities where treatments such as brain tissue removal target tumors and epilepsy. Once the tissue is removed, the students can return to the Human Brain Lab to study the tissue.
The clinical excellence was a major draw for scientists including Dr. Harris and Dr. Sergei Kirov, director of the Human Brain Lab, when they decided to join the MCG faculty. The clinicians--including Neurosurgery Chair Mark Lee, Neurology Chair David Hess and Psychiatry and Health Behavior Chair Peter Buckley--helped design the new program.
“A real breakthrough came when Ned Pruitt (MCG neurologist and residency program director for the Department of Neurology) offered to allow graduate students to participate in some of the medical students’ rotations. He even offered to help co-direct the clinical neuroscience core course,” Dr. Harris says.
Neuroscience students will spend most of the 4.7 years it takes on average to complete a degree working alongside established, funded researchers such as Drs. Lewis, Harris, Brann and Yu. Chris, who has started his second year, says the astrocytes he and fellow student Mark Witcher study today could certainly see him through his thesis and beyond.
“Astrocytes are a hot area in research,” he says. “Before, they were thought of as very passive C9 but now we are finding out all kinds of things they do to help synapses develop. Mark and I did a paper for our neuroscience class that we are submitting for publication looking at astrocytes’ contribution in epilepsy before and after a seizure. I am really excited about where it could go from here.”
Visit www.mcg.edu/neuroscience for more information about MCG's neuroscience graduate program and www.mcg.edu/Institutes/INS/ to learn ore about the MCG Institute of Neuroscience.
- Toni Baker