Behavioral Neuroscience Program
Area head Ann-Marie Torregrossa, PhD, (center) with a student and lab personnel
Behavior is the organized output of an array of biological processes. To understand behavior requires understanding the mechanisms and principles that contribute to behavior at multiple levels of organization (i.e., neuroanatomical, neurophysiological, neurochemical). This is the core tenet of the Behavioral Neuroscience Doctoral Program. Students in the program are expected to achieve general competence in the breadth of biological factors that control and affect behavior, as well as in-depth proficiency in areas relevant to their special interests.
Area Head: Ann-Marie Torregrossa, PhD
The Learning Environment
Program faculty conduct groundbreaking nationally recognized research on motivated behaviors, pain, ingestive behavior, drug addiction, and synaptic plasticity. A number of adjunct faculty contribute to the intellectual breadth of our program, and our students interact with a larger neuroscience community at UB, making our program a particularly rich and diverse intellectual environment.
Through a close and personalized student-mentor relationship, students gain an appreciation for programmatic problem-oriented, rather than technique-oriented, research. Our goal is to produce sophisticated, versatile scientists and teachers who will contribute meaningfully to academia and industry.
Labs and Facilities
Well-equipped laboratories provide a variety of opportunities for technical training, including:
- behavioral paradigms for assessing motivation, learning, and social interaction
- behavioral testing for the assessment of pain and allodynia
- chemogenetics
- CRISPR/dCas9-mediated gene regulation
- fiber photometry
- genome-wide association studies (GWAS) in outbred rats
- histological techniques (including immunocytochemical techniques)
- integration of genomic, transcriptomic, and behavioral data
- intravenous self-administration (IVSA) for modeling addiction-relevant behaviors
- machine learning-based behavioral quantification
- maternal behavior
- microdialysis and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with electrochemical detection
- microinjection
- microstructural analysis of feeding behaviors
- operant techniques and psychopharmacology
- optogenetics
- psychophysical testing
- quantitative polymerase chain reaction (PCR)
- radioimmunoassay
- single-cell electrophysiology
- sonic and ultrasonic vocal recordings and analysis
- stereotaxic techniques (electrophysiological and chemical)
- virally mediated network mapping
- Western blotting
The Admissions Process
Although there are no set requirements for admission to the program, preference is given to students with a master’s or bachelor’s degree in psychology or neuroscience, who have been involved in research, and who have some course background in physiology or neuroscience.
As our program is mentorship-based, students are admitted to work with an individual faculty member. Faculty members accepting students vary from year to year. Before applying, prospective students should view the list of faculty members accepting students and/or contact potential mentors.
