Faculty and Research Facilities in Experimental Psychology

The Behavior Analysis Laboratory is located on the second floor of Rowe Hall and consists of rodent and avian colony rooms, behavioral testing rooms with state-of-the-art controlling and recording equipment, a wet lab for surgery and pharmacological preparations, computer workstations for data analysis, and a conference/meeting room. There is also a student laboratory fully equipped with behavioral testing chambers for the undergraduate course in behavior analysis.

The B.R.A.I.N. Center is located in the Health Professions Building. The facilities are used for laboratory classes and individual research projects. The B.R.A.I.N. Center is equipped for small animal surgery, a full array of behavioral tests (including psychophysiology), microscopic and biochemical analyses, and a fully equipped cellular and molecular laboratory.

The Field Neurosciences Institute (FNI) Laboratory is part of the Brain Research and Integrative Neuroscience (BRAIN) Center, located on the second floor of the research wing in the Health Professions Building. The research mission of the FNI laboratory is to better understand the mechanisms involved in the recovery of function following damage to the central nervous system and to devise strategies to promote these mechanisms in clinically relevant ways. Current research focuses on devising potential treatments for neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Huntington’s disease (HD), Parkinson’s disease (PD), and Alzheimer’s disease (AD). The lab is fully equipped with a wide variety of specialized equipment for testing the efficacy of pharmacological treatments, stem cell therapies, and genetic manipulations to counteract neuropathological and behavioral deficits in rodent models of HD, PD, and/or AD.

The Laboratory is located on the second floor of the Health Profession Building, attenant to the B.R.A.I.N Center and to the HP Vivarium. It is fully equipped for histological, biochemical and molecular biology and has access to core equipment allowing exploration of phenomenon ranging from behavioral testing, fluorescent microscopy, electrophysiology, biochemistry, molecular biology to cell culture. Currents projects involves the role of neuroinflammatory processes in 1) normal aging of the brain and 2) in the development of neurodegenerative diseases, particularly Alzheimer's Disease.​

Located in the Health Professions Building, this laboratory contains equipment for wet work, chemicals, and building/designing probes for measurements of experimental animal brain chemistry (microdialysis) or neuron electrical activity, and related histological work. Two state of the art high performance liquid chromatography systems (for measuring small concentrations of brain chemicals) are available in the shared space associated with the (Brain Research and Integrative Neuroscience) B.R.A.I.N. Center. Current experiments investigate neurochemical differences underlying behavior deterioration in a mouse Huntington’s disease model. We investigate neurochemical changes during operant tasks designed to expose cognitive deficits that precede movement malfunction. Separate animal procedure and testing rooms provide sufficient facilities to perform experiments using multiple techniques and measures.