Neuroscience and Behavior Program

Area Adviser: Dr. Jeffrey Stevens

Overview

Welcome to the homepage of the Neuroscience and Behavior Ph.D. Program in the Department of Psychology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL). Broadly speaking, faculty research interests include comparative cognition, decision making, learning and memory, executive function, memory, drug abuse, neuroscience of addiction, and network neuroscience. We pride ourselves on a low student to faculty ratio where graduate students work very closely with faculty on research projects. In addition to this close mentoring model, we are able to offer highly individualized programs of study that can be tailored to fit the student's interest and career goals. Our graduate program is very flexible, which means that the students are in the driver's seat for their own experience. In collaboration with your advisor and committee, you decide which courses to take when and when to focus on research.

Along with tailoring graduate training to fit the research and career goals of the trainee, students are exposed through instruction and collaboration to interdisciplinary and translational approaches to many of the pressing question in the study of neuroscience and behavior. Such training is enhanced through our affiliations with Eppley Cancer Center at University of Nebraska Medical Center and the VA Hospital; Ecology, Evolution and Behavior Program in the School of Biological Sciences; the Behavioral Health Program of Excellence in Sociology; the Substance Abuse Research Cluster (SARC); the Center for Brain, Biology and Behavior (CB3); the Rural Drug Addiction Research Center (RDAR), as well as the many collaborations faculty have with other researchers throughout the globe.

Admission Requirements

The faculty in the Neuroscience and Behavior Program welcome applications from students with undergraduate majors in psychology as well as those from a variety of related areas, such as animal science, biology, neuroscience, pharmacology, etc. Successful applicants to our program typically have previous research experience with experimental animals (rats, mice) or human neuroscience. Because of the diverse research interests of our faculty members, applicants are strongly encouraged to contact the faculty members with whom they are most likely to work and identify them in their application. In addition, please check the department graduate student admission requirements.

The PhD Path

Like other programs, the Neuroscience and Behavior program offers M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in Psychology. All graduate students are admitted directly into the doctoral program but typically earn the Master’s degree as part of their Ph.D. program. We have an overview of the Ph.D. path and the Department Grad Handbook to guide progress.

Graduate training is governed by the Graduate Chair and the Graduate Executive Committee. Upon admission, each graduate student is assigned an advisor in the program. A doctoral Supervisory Committee is approved for each student by the Graduate Executive Committee prior to the completion of 50% of the student’s course work. A Supervisory Committee must include at least three members consisting of professors from our department, as well as at least one member consisting of a professor from a department outside of our department. The Supervisory Committee has responsibility for designing the student’s program of study and supervising the implementation of that program through the completion of comprehensive examinations and/or other approved demonstration of mastery of the discipline and the doctoral dissertation project.

Coursework

The Neuroscience and Behavior Ph.D. program is specifically designed to be flexible in terms of matching specific research interests of a given student. Therefore, the specific course requirements beyond the core requirements of the Ph.D. program are determined by the students’ advisor along with a Supervisory Committee.

Department course requirements

• Quantitative Methods for the Behavioral Sciences I and II (PSYC 931 and 932): 6 credits
• Program's proseminar (Physiological Proseminar for N&B): 3 credits
• One other psychology graduate course (900 level) outside of your program: 3 credits
• Human diversity course: 1 credit
• Ethics course: 1 credit
• Teaching Methods for Psychology (PSYC 974): 1 credit

Program course requirements

• Fundamentals of Neuroscience and Behavior (PSYC 912A & 912B): 6 credits split over two semesters
• Professionalism, Ethics, and Diversity in Neuroscience and Behavior (PSYC 913): 3 credits (satisfies department's ethics requirement and diversity requirement)
• Physiological Proseminar (PSYC 904): 3 credits (satisfies department's program proseminar requirement)

Example course schedule

First year fall

• Fundamentals of Neuroscience and Behavior (PSYC 912A) or Professionalism, Ethics, and Diversity in Neuroscience and Behavior (PSYC 913): 3 credits
• Quantitative Methods for the Behavioral Sciences I (PSYC 931): 3 credits
• Teaching Methods for Psychology (PSYC 974): 1 credit
• Research Problems Other Than Thesis (PSYC 996): 2 credits

First year spring

• Fundamentals of Neuroscience and Behavior (PSYC 912B): 3 credits
• Quantitative Methods for the Behavioral Sciences II (PSYC 932): 3 credits
• Research Problems Other Than Thesis (PSYC 996): 3 credits

First year summer

• Research Problems Other Than Thesis (PSYC 996): 5 credits

Second year fall

• Professionalism, Ethics, and Diversity in Neuroscience and Behavior (PSYC 913) or Fundamentals of Neuroscience and Behavior (PSYC 912A): 3 credits
• Grad-level psychology course outside of Neuroscience and Behavior: 3 credits
• Research Problems Other Than Thesis (PSYC 996): 3 credits

Second year spring

• Fundamentals of Neuroscience and Behavior (PSYC 912B): 3 credits
• Physiological Proseminar (PSYC 904): 3 credits
• Research Problems Other Than Thesis (PSYC 996): 3 credits

Second year summer

• Research Problems Other Than Thesis (PSYC 996): 5 credits

After the second year, the coursework should drop off as you focus on your research. But, given the diversity of research and student interests, additional course work may include specialized reading courses, as well as other core courses offered in other departments.  For example, students specializing in animal behavior might take one or more of the core courses in the School of Biological Sciences’ program in Ecology, Evolution, or Behavior.  Students specializing in behavioral neuroscience might take core courses in other departments that teach advanced pharmacology, neurobiology and immunology courses.  Additional courses in quantitative methods (e.g., Multilevel Modeling in the Behavioral Sciences--PSYC 944) are highly encouraged, and the department offers a concentration in Quantitative Methods requiring 18 hours of quantitative coursework and a quant-related comprehensive exam.

Students in the Neuroscience and Behavior program are required to be continuously engaged in research, which often includes credits in a research course each semester such as PSYC 996 before completing your comprehensive exam and PSYC 999 afterwards. These courses should be used to fill in your schedule to reach 9 credit hours per semester (5 in the summer). At some point, you will likely switch exclusively to these courses to fulfill your credits.

Master's and PhD Degrees

To obtain a Master's degree, a student typically chooses Option B. Under this option, the student must earn a minimum of 36 semester hours of credit, at least 18 of which must be earned in courses open exclusively to graduate students (900 or 800 level without 400 or lower counterparts). The program must include not fewer than 18 hours in the major. Visit the Graduate Studies Catalog for more information on options and for forms and deadlines. The Master's is typically defended by the summer of the second year.

Students with a Master's degree in a related area admitted in the PhD program will be able to transfer some coursework. Transfer credit is determined by UNL Office of Graduate Studies policy and the Neuroscience and Behavior faculty.

The PhD program normally takes five years for completion. To meet the doctoral degree requirements, a student needs to complete 27 hours of graduate work within an 18-month period (15 of which must be presented that are not related to your master’s degree if you did your master’s work at UNL), finishes final examination (oral defense of dissertation work) and submit his/her dissertation at least three weeks before the final oral examination. For information on PhD requirements, visit Doctoral Degree Requirements.

Annual Evaluations

To ensure that everything is going smoothly for your grad school experience, we have annual meetings between the program coordinator and each of the students in the program. This both offers a progress update and provides you an opportunity to give feedback to the coordinator on the program and your experience. Before the meeting, we will have you submit your progress for the last year and have your advisor submit an evaluation of your progress. Then the program coordinator will write up a letter of evaluation and send it to you and your advisor. Any remediation plans will be included in this letter, but it is mainly a way to celebrate your accomplishments for the year.

Financial Support

All graduate students in the Neuroscience and Behavior program are supported by department teaching assistantships and/or by research assistantships from faculty grants. We provide a highly supportive environment that encourages students to also seek support through UNL scholarships and fellowships, as well as extramural agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Core Research Labs

Coordinator: Dr. Aron Barbey

Dr. Barbey heads the DECISION NEUROSCIENCE LAB where he studies the cognitive neuroscience of human intelligence. Unlocking the nature and biological origins of human intelligence remains one of the greatest scientific challenges of our time – with the potential for transformative impact in the clinical and health sciences. By achieving a deeper understanding of the network architecture of intelligence in the human brain, we aim to develop more precise biological phenotypes of mental illness, identify neuroscience-guided treatment targets, and establish personalized interventions for precision health. Our research suggests that general intelligence emerges from global, system-wide brain network dynamics and reflects the interaction of executive, social, and emotional processes. We believe scientific advances in the study of human intelligence will be propelled by bringing together these core facets of intelligence – infused by new research on the dynamic and adaptive nature of brain network function and modern AI methods from Computer Science and Engineering to elucidate the information processing architecture of intelligence in the human brain. Our work in clinical and translational neuroscience has focused on traumatic brain injury and sports-related concussion, conducting studies to investigate the network architecture of intelligence and applying interventions to remediate executive dysfunction through non-invasive brain stimulation (tDCS), mindfulness meditation, physical activity and aerobic fitness training, and nutritional intervention.

Expertise and interests: decision neuroscience, intelligence, network neuroscience, neuroimaging, traumatic brain injury

Coordinator: Dr. Rick A. Bevins

Research in the BEHAVIORAL NEUROPHARMACOLOGY LAB bridges areas of neuroscience, pharmacology, psychology, immunology, and animal learning and cognition. With the motivated effort of exceptional graduate and undergraduate students and the consistent support of the Psychology Department, the School of Biological Sciences, the College of Arts and Sciences, and extramural funding agencies such as NIH, we have made great progress in answering important questions related to drug abuse. In this research effort, we use preclinical animal models to understand factors involved in the development and maintenance of drug abuse. This research includes assessment of factors affecting the ability of drug cues to acquire new meaning and hence control over behavior. Other research effort focuses on novelty and sensation seeking, learned associations between environmental cues and abused drugs (source of cravings), and immunotherapy (vaccine) techniques against drug addiction. For more detail, we invite you to explore the laboratory via our website.

Expertise and interests: behavioral pharmacology, learning, substance abuse, nicotine, methamphetamine

Coordinator: Dr. Kathy Chiou

The focus of research in the CLINICAL NEUROSCIENCE AND NEUROPSYCHOLOGY LAB is to identify and understand how neurological injuries affect complex, higher order cognitive functions. We are specifically interested in constructs such as metacognition, self-awareness, cognitive control, and learning/memory. Current projects in the lab utilize structural and functional neuroimaging methodologies (e.g., fMRI, DTI), experimental behavioral paradigms, as well as traditional neuropsychological assessments to investigate these cognitive deficits in human adults with moderate to severe traumatic brain injury (TBI). We hope to translate findings from the lab to clinical applications such as the development of new tools for improved assessment and rehabilitation of cognitive deficits in TBI.

Expertise and interests: traumatic brain injury, neuropsychological assessment, diffusion tensor imaging, fMRI, metacognition

Coordinator: Dr. Nicholas Hubbard

The NEUROCOGNITIVE TRANSLATION LAB aims to advance fundamental theory and cultivate cutting-edge methods within cognitive neuroscience to better understand and predict mental abilities and patient health outcomes. We accomplish these aims through the study of typical and abnormal biopsychological phenomena. The NeuroCognitive Translation Lab applies expertise from behavioral, brain imaging (e.g., fMRI, DTI, fNIRS), and computational (e.g., machine learning, network analysis, pattern analyses) techniques to answer two research questions: (1) What can our neural and psychological signatures tell us about our mental abilities?, and (2) How can we better measure and interpret these signatures for predicting human health outcomes?

Expertise and interests: brain imaging, cognitive neuroscience, memory, prediction, translational neuroscience

Coordinator: Dr. Tierney Lorenz

The WOMEN, IMMUNITY AND SEXUAL HEALTH LAB investigates the ways that sexual behavior impact women's immune and endocrine function, as well as ways to help women with mental and/or physical health conditions have happy, healthy sexual lives. We also focus on helping survivors of sexual trauma through basic science and clinical research. Our research draws from evolutionary and feminist science perspectives, and uses methods from multiple fields, including measures of hormones and immune markers, psychophysiological measures of sexual and autonomic arousal, clinical trials, surveys and interviews.

Expertise and interests: sex/gender differences, women’s health, sexual behavior, trauma, depression, hormones, inflammation, minimally invasive biomarkers

Coordinator: Dr. Maital Neta

Research in the COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE NEUROSCIENCE LAB capitalizes on a number of methods from psychology and neuroscience to examine ambiguity resolution in the domain of emotional facial expressions. Specifically, although some expressions provide clear predictive information that something good (e.g., happy) or bad (e.g., angry) will happen, other expressions, like surprise, have predicted both positive (e.g., birthday party) and negative (e.g., car accident) events for us in the past. When presented in the absence of contextual information, these ambiguously valenced expressions can be used to delineate a valence bias: ambiguous stimuli are stably interpreted negatively by some people and positively by others. The working hypothesis in the lab is that positivity requires regulation.

Expertise and interests: affective neuroscience, emotion regulation, individual differences

Coordinator: Dr. Hillary Schwarb

Memory is foundational to the human experience and, in many ways, governs how we interact with the world and shapes our identities. In the TRANSLATIONAL COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE & MEMORY LAB, we focus we on characterizing the organization of human memory and supporting brain structures in both functional and dysfunctional systems. We use a variety of behavioral and neuroimaging tools to investigate these issues as they relate to both basic cognitive theory and specific real-world problems, particularly in health science and medicine. In our lab we take a collaborative approach, leveraging the benefits of cross-disciplinary team-based science.

Expertise and interests: Memory, structural and functional MRI, aging, sex hormones, traumatic brain injury, flexible cognition

Coordinator: Dr. Jeffrey Stevens

The CANINE COGNITION AND HUMAN INTERACTION LAB focuses on understanding both dog cognition and how interacting with dogs influences human behavior and cognition. Our research follows the bounded rationality approach, which explores how organisms with limited time, information, and computational abilities make adaptive decisions. We use theoretical, experimental, and comparative methods to model and empirically investigate the cognitive processes organisms use when making decisions. One of our research topics explores the cognitive mechanisms, such as patience and accurate memory, needed to implement decision strategies in cooperative situations. Another research topic develops and tests process-based models of intertemporal choice. We also investigate questions of risky choice, quantification, timing, memory, and social networks to help understand how humans and other animals make decisions in an uncertain world.

Expertise and interests: animal cognition, cooperation, decision making, dogs, impulsivity, patience, self-control

Coordinator: Dr. Ken Wakabayashi

The NEUROCIRCUITRY OF MOTIVATED BEHAVIOR LAB focuses on understanding the fundamental processes in the brain underpinning reward-seeking behavior, and how these systems can become hijacked by drugs of abuse, ultimately resulting in addiction and alcoholism. He addresses this at a neurocircuit level by integrating animal behavior, in vivo neurochemistry and genetic approaches to manipulate and observe subgroups of neurons to examine the brain mechanisms of motivation.

Expertise and interests: addiction, alcohol models, genetic targeting, in vivo monitoring, motivation, neurochemistry, neurocircuittry, reward seeking

Affiliated faculty

Former students

Questions

I hope we have sparked your interest in the Neuroscience and Behavior Program. If so, application information can be obtained via the web or send an inquiry to Jamie Longwell at jamie.longwell@unl.edu. Feel free to send any general questions about the Neuroscience and Behavior Program to Dr. Jeffrey Stevens, the Neuroscience and Behavior Program Area Coordinator, at jstevens5@unl.edu. Interest in a faculty and his/her research program should be sent directly to the individual.