THE UNDERGRADUATE MISSION

The Stellar lab offers undergraduates the chance to learn and practice relevant research skills including animal handling, rat neurosurgery, operant behavior training and testing, drug preparation and administration, and histology on brain sections. The intellectual connection to the fast growing field of neuroscience provides limitless challenges in understanding the experiments through learning fact and theory of brain function. The application to clinical problems including drug addiction, affective disorders such as depression, Parkinson’s disease, etc. gives students a sense of contributing to a field with important benefits to humans. Students who work in the laboratory also benefit in having an extra dimension to their undergraduate experience which greatly enhances their application to medical or graduate schools. The entire operation seems to depend on the correct philosophy where all students are given the respect and responsibility they have earned on the basis of their experience and ability in the lab, and not simply their academic rank.