Journal club

These are offered as an opportunity for you to become adept at critically reading and analyzing journal articles. We will work together to identify a set of topics to discuss. Using these topics we will identify what it is we want to know and assign journal club topics to pairs of students. Each pair will be responsible for presenting a coherent seminar on a topic (I will help you pick out appropriate papers). There will be an overview placing the papers in context (about 20-30 minutes) and a presentation of the related papers (about 20-30 minutes each). Each session will be followed by a question and answer period. Extra time after the journal club will be used for meetings between me and other groups presenting later (for discussion of outlines, questions about the topic, etc.). You will be responsible for scheduling these. I will operate under the first come, first served rule.
As an incentive to everyone else reading the papers, people not presenting will be required to write a 1 paragraph summary of the papers. These should be typed up before class and are handed in after class (no late summaries will be accepted) and will be evaluated by the presenters and me. This means that you must have a good idea of the background material (provided by class and/or the review paper handed out by the presenters prior to their presentation). You must then be able to describe why the research was important and what the results tell us (i.e., what question did it answer). It is not an in-depth analysis but does require that you understand the basic point of the papers. Features that are unclear to you should be brought up during the presentations and highlighted in your summary. Simply saying that you didn’t understand the papers is unacceptable. I will be monitoring participation at these events and will use this as a factor in determining final grades.

Schedule

Lecture 1 (week 4) Jen and Robyn "Tarnishing the Golden Years: Alzheimer's Disease"

Lecture 2 (week 5) Nick and Ryan "The Destruction of the Mind: The Neuropathology of Alzheimer's Disease"

Lecture 3 (week 6) Taylor and David "Losing Your Mind One Cell at a Time: The Molecular and Cellular Aspects of Alzheimer's Disease"

Lecture 4 (week 7) Bryan and Colleen "Saving Your Past: Future Treatments for Alzheimer's Disease"

Lecture 5 (week 8) Katie and Jenny "Vision and the Brain: How We See"

paper download

Lecture 6 (week 9) Cassidy, Nick, and Pat "How Do Hearing Implants Work?"

Lecture 7 (week 10) Anjulie and Anjalie "How Do We Feel Cold?"

Lecture 8 (week 11) Randy and Melissa "The Perception of Time"