Don’t Turn Your Nose Up at This S.C.U.T.
In the Gothard Lab, undergraduates have always been integrated into all aspects of research; they train the animals, collect and analyze data, and help plan follow-up experiments. Recently, part of our mission focus turned to improved training of our undergraduates to share their work with both the scientific and lay community, as we believe the scientists and doctors of the future need to be able to clearly explain complex ideas, answer questions, and share their enthusiasm for scientific research.
This was the motivation to start S.C.U.T. (Science Communication in Undergraduate Training). All undergraduates participated in weekly meetings where they were immersed in various projects, challenged to think critically, and explain their ideas in understandable ways. Under this format, students completed side projects of their own, a step further than what was usually completed under the wings of the graduate students. They analyzed data that was not previously processed for ongoing experiments and brought to light new valuable dimensions of the results.
After only four months of S.C.U.T., six of eleven undergraduate students in the lab were able to develop posters that reported new findings from our data and that without their work would have been left unattended. They carried out new analyses and discussed the new results in the context of everything else that these data yielded so far.
These posters went on to be presented at the Spring 2024 UofA Physiology Undergraduate Poster Session, where 13% of the posters came from the Gothard Lab. One student, senior Eli Rahamim, graduating this Spring with two B.S. degrees, one in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science and another in Psychological Sciences, headed a project focused on automating the process of labeling facial expressions of macaques using a program called DeepLabCut. His poster won the first place PSIO Poster Team Award for his poster’s visual appeal, clear explanations, and overall impressive work.
S.C.U.T. is here to stay, for the betterment of the students and the lab overall.
