(music playing) Dennis Sholler: My name is Dennis Sholler.
I am a fourth year student in the School of Arts and Sciences, majoring in Cell Biology
and Neuroscience and minoring in Psychology, and currently I conduct my undergraduate research
under Dr. Mark West in the Department of Psychology and we study brain activity and effective
behavior in rats during cocaine self-administration.
Our project seeks to characterize animals based on individual addiction susceptibility
and we do this by measuring two separate variables.
The first one is a measure of the exteroceptive cues, which is the discriminative stimulus
or the context or cue that prompts drug taking in the animal or signals cocaine availability
and the second is the hedonist effects that arrived from the presence of the drug itself,
so the negative or positive feelings of having cocaine on board.
What we find is that early in sessions of cocaine self administration, animals actually
rely on more heavily on the exteroceptive cues but as they gain exposure over time to
the interoceptive cue, that is the drug, they actually depend more on that for responding
for drug in future sessions, so while this general trend, or this general inverse relationship
exists between the exteroceptive and the interoceptive cues, it actually exists as a spectrum rather
than a binary, so what we see is that all animals dissociate responding from the exteroceptive
cues and rely more heavily on the interoceptive cues at different times, so what we see more
or less is that animals do have individual susceptibility to addiction that varies at
different levels depending on how much they rely on exteroceptive or interoceptive cues
for responding to cocaine.
All research in drug addiction and chronic drug abuse is invaluable and drug abuse is
a widespread prominent problem in this country and worldwide it affects up to 20 millions
of people in the world, if not in this country alone, but we still don’t know that much.
The brain is still as much of an enigma as it was in the 1950s when people really began
introducing techniques to study it, so if we want to characterize an illness or an ailment
like drug addiction that spans behavioral, neuropharmacological and societal and social
needs, we need to pinpoint some of the neural processes behind it so I think that taking
both an approach in neuroscience and an approach in pharmacology to tackle drug addiction is
something that should be one of our highest initiatives.
I have been involved in research at Rutgers through the Aresty Summer science program
which is funded through the Aresty Research Center for Undergraduates and the summer after
my freshman year I was paired with Dr. Mark West in the Department of Psychology and I
was able to complete my first independent project that studied trends in skilled operant
behavior during cocaine self-administration.
And that acted more or less as a springboard into future projects and what is most important
about this is that the Aresty Research Center kind of catalyzed a research effort for me
that not only led me into other opportunities but at this point has led me into acceptance
into a graduate program that ideally will lead me into a lifelong career in research.
So when you major in a field like cell biology and neuroscience, the course isn’t always
the most exciting.
Some of the things like all courses, they’re monotonous, but I think that having the opportunity
to participate in research is the reason that I enjoyed my experience at Rutgers so much,
because I had something I could always go back to and say okay, maybe this was a tough
day but you know the end goal.
We have the vision and we know what’s going to come of this, so participating in research
at Rutgers has always been more of an inspiration to get to the point where I want to end up
rather than a chore or something else that I had to do.
I think that one of the most important parts of what we do in research is give back and
I think that when you have the skill set to give back, you enable the other ones to move
forward, so if it weren’t for my mentorship from Dr. West I wouldn’t have been able
to move forward so I owe it to the field to kind of instill some of those same skills
that I learned along the way so that others can get to the same point or attain the same
level of understanding in their field.
We’re lucky enough to have many centers like the Aresty Research Center that harbor
those research experiences at Rutgers, so seek and you shall find and it’s very true.
Don’t be afraid to send an e-mail or make a cold call because the professors are more
likely than not will be thrilled at your enthusiasm and will want to bring you on board.
(music playing)