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Department Overview
The Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the Drexel University College of Medicine provides an outstanding academic environment for pursuing multidisciplinary training and research in neuroscience. The department has recently expanded by recruiting 6 new faculty members and has currently 36 research grants, including 26 NIH grants, with over $4 million in annual direct cost as well as several endowments. Recent grant awards included the renewal of the spinal cord Program Project, several major NIH grants and subcontracts. The department offers postdoctoral training through 2 NIH training grants and graduate student training through the Neuroscience program for outstanding individuals preparing for a research career in the biomedical sciences. The Department promotes a highly interactive and collaborative environment and shared facilities that encourages training, research and lab meetings outside the confines of one laboratory, thus providing flexibility and diversity in the training process.
Current faculty research interests include the following areas:
Training can be obtained in all aspects of advanced microscopy and imaging, tissue culture, transplantation techniques, gene therapy and sequencing, behavioral neurobiology, kinematics, intracellular recording, patch clamping, computer modeling of neurobiological processes and robotics. The Department has well equipped shared facilities for confocal microscopy, electron microscopy, image acquisition and processing, small animal surgery, behavioral analysis, biochemistry and molecular biology. Research training is also supplemented by a seminar series featuring faculty, postdoctoral fellows and outside speakers. Journal clubs and discussions of research findings are scheduled regularly and often shared among individual laboratories. The Department is also responsible for 3 major courses given to medical students that include Medical Neuroscience, Gross Anatomy and MicroAnatomy.
The Program Project Grant on Recovery of Function after Spinal Cord Injury awarded by the NIH involves 7 individual faculty with additional support coming from national and international foundations including the Christopher Reeve Research Foundation and EPVA. This program comprises neurobiological research ranging from molecular neurobiology of spinal cord regeneration to functional studies of recovery of motor behavior after spinal cord injury, offering an excellent multidisciplinary training opportunity in the field of spinal cord injury. |