CalicoBlue

What sort of applicable experience do you look for when hiring post-docs in your group?

I got my neuroscience start in an auditory lab doing extracellular recordings in awake bats!

Do you have any specific thoughts on "smounds" and do you think it's time for basic sensory research to start focusing more on interactions between different modalities?

In recent years me and my team have highlighted cruel and bizarre animal tests such as testing mushrooms on animals, the effects of cocaine and ecstasy and seeing if brain damaged monkeys were afraid of plastic snakes!

Can you say more about this? There is plenty of very valid research out there that requires the use of certain drugs or damage to brain areas in order to learn more about the brain. For example, by damaging an area of the brain, researchers can present the monkey with a fear stimulus (plastic snake) and see if their responses are changed. If there is a change, depending on the sort of behavior produced, they can do follow up tests to determine what role that brain area plays in fear (is it for unconditioned or conditioned fear, if it's conditioned fear does it play a role in acquisition, retrieval, or extinction?)

Your post made it sound that you're part of a group to abolish animals as test subjects for cosmetics, but it sounds more like you're interested in shutting down any sort of animal research.

Thank you for your response! In case you happen to come back and check on replies, I worked with Ellen in the UW psych department - I was her full-time tech for a few years in a time when they didn't have grad students or postdocs in the lab, so it was fantastic experience for graduate school.

I'm a 4th year grad student now working on pheromone communication and perception of social odors. Having spent time working in both audition and olfaction, I've become more and more interested in the central processing of behaviorally relevant stimuli from multiple modalities. Hopefully when I graduate, I'll have the opportunity to actually do that sort of research.