Student blogs

Here I am continuing with my neuroscience elective track review!

Frontiers in Cognitive Neuroscience

This class lectures were divided into a few topics such as perception, sensorimotor integration, memory and social cognition. I was not expecting it but this was my favorite course out of the six of them! The lecturers were really good and made their presentations really interesting. For instance, I did not have much knowledge about olfaction before this class, but intranasal drug delivery is a fascinating topic of research and I learned about it here.

Examination consisted of reading two papers and then discussing in groups a question proposed by the course leaders. Then you presented your conclusions. For instance, mine was related to stress and the hippocampus.

Neurogenetics

In this class we had daily lectures about copy number variation, trinucleotide mutations, ALS, mitochondrial diseases, twin studies and more. Interestingly, we also had a workshop about genetic screening where we did a case study regarding a patient with cognitive decline symptoms, who had certain family members with dementia. I think that was the highlight of the class!

Examination consisted of literature studies/group presentation. We were given around 10 papers relating to a disease and we had to answer certain questions relating to the genetics of the disease.

Neurodegenerative disorders I

This class gave a lot of clinical insight into neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, Multiple Sclerosis, etc. But we also learned about cellular mechanisms such as autophagy, and mitochondrial function.

We had time during class to discuss one disease (molecular pathways, treatment, etc) in groups and then do a short presentation.

Examination consisted of a 15-minute group assignment/presentation on another disease (for example, frontotemporal dementia).

Honestly, having all these classes back-to-back felt like a lot, and I did struggle a bit to manage with all the new information. But for most of the courses, we got some fika during breaks to give us energy for all the lectures!

And at the end, I got to learn about several new topics and super fascinating research so I am glad I chose this elective track!