Elliott Beaton, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Psychology, was selected for two multi-day educator workshops hosted this summer by the Allen Institute in Seattle. The application-based programs prepare college faculty to teach neuroscience using large, openly available scientific data sets collected by Allen Institute scientists and collaborators.
The workshops brought together faculty from across the United States, Canada, and South America who teach neuroscience, biology, and psychology. One workshop centered on connectomics, the detailed mapping of connections between individual cells in the brain. The other covered the use of the Python programming language to analyze large sets of neuroscience data.
Dr. Beaton plans to use what he learned, along with resources shared by the Allen Institute, into existing courses and to help build laboratory courses for the new B.S. in Neuroscience at LSU New Orleans. The work will give students applied practice in coding and quantitative analysis with real neuroscience data rather than simulated exercises.
“The skills that our neuroscience students will pick up from what we build with the Allen Institute’s open resources, coding and quantitative analysis on real neuroscience data, are the skills that will carry them into graduate or medical school programs, and into careers,” Dr. Beaton said. “That is what this degree is designed to do.”
Dr. Beaton directs the Stress, Cognition, and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN) Laboratory and serves as graduate coordinator for the doctoral program in Applied Psychology. He helped establish the B.S. in Neuroscience with colleagues in the Department of Psychology, across the College of Sciences, and in the Office of Academic Affairs. It is the only Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience currently offered at a public university in Louisiana.
The Allen Institute is an independent, nonprofit bioscience research organization in Seattle. Through its education program, it offers professional development for college faculty who want to bring open scientific data into undergraduate classrooms.
