Alev, Beyza and Melisa left our lab after 3 years of scientific endeavor and fun. Accustomed to carry out a tremendous amount of work and desperate to make discoveries, Alev, Beyza and Melisa are respectively admitted to Ph.D. programs at UConn, Rutgers and Cornell. We wish them the best of luck in their future studies!
Our new publication, made possible by Nilay Atesyakar, investigates the relationship between cognitive competence and behavioral despair. We revealed that rats with low cognitive competence as assessed by learning performance in the Y-Maze, but not in the radial arm maze (!), were significantly more vulnerable to behavioral despair. In contrast, rats with high cognitive competence were resilient to the negative effects of the forced swim test, irrespective of the spatial memory task used.
Asst. Prof. Ünal recently guested on Mirgün Cabas and Can Kozanoğlu's podcast Nereden Başlasam? (where to start?), discussing what neuroscience is and where it is heading in the near future.
The 30-minute podcast is released on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6O7PH7tqLiERxXfxY9mIhB
Check out the new virtual neuroscience university/alliance organized under the European Universities Initiative: http://theneurotech.eu/
Congratulations to our RA, Alev Ecevitoğlu on receving the $400 SfN Middle Eastern Neuroscientist Initiative Travel Award to attend the annual SfN meeting in Chicago!
Alev is the first author on our accepted abstract titled "effects of subchronic oral ketamine on behavioral despair and spatial memory in rats". This work will be presented by Asst. Prof. Ünal in nanosymposium #270 - Neural mechanisms underlying depression and anxiety.
