So my name is Felice Elefant and I'm a professor at Drexel University. We are very interested
in how we learn and think, really our cognitive ability. How we perceive information, how
we learn and how we can remember that information. Unfortunately, cognitive ability is compromised
in neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease and a whole array of different types
of neurological disorders. So by understanding how we learn and how we remember things, we
can then figure out how to cure those issues when impairments happen in neurodegenerative
disorders.
I'm originally from New Jersey, Newark, New Jersey, right outside of New York City. I
first got interested in science when I was a freshman in college. I actually didn't originally
intend to be a biology major; I was actually a special ed major and I took biology for
fun and I was just very fascinated with it. And so I kept taking more and more courses
and after my freshman year I decided to switch over to biology majors.
I like my job because I can decide what I feel and what my lab feels are important questions
that have to be addressed. We always keep ourselves grounded in really trying to have
a question that will help people and help different types of disorders. I was very good
at math when I was younger, I always really loved math, but now I would say that my PhD
graduates students probably surpass me in math and so we work as a team. As long as
you have the right team and everybody has their different strengths, that's okay.
Well, quite frankly I was always interested in how people think and how they learn. We're
very interested in how our experience can actually change our brain and impact how we
think and learn and actually enhance that. Obviously, because that ability is compromised
in neurological disorders, I became very interested in how we can fix those issues and these types
of disorders. Our short term goal right now is to really get some hardcore evidence of
how our environment changes the way our genes in our body are expressed in the brain, actually.
And how, by having a positive environment, it's called 'social enrichment', where we
can interact and keep our minds busy, how are those environmental changes translated
into hardcore wiring changes in our brain. We have an idea of what's going on. We have
a hypothesis and we want to test that and figure out what exactly the changes are that
are occurring in response to a good environment versus a bad environment.
Having a good lab and a good environment can be so much fun. Really the lab I feel, works
as a unit. Although I'm a faculty member here, I'm a principal investigator, I treat my students,
my graduate students as very close to family. We work together as a team. It can be a lot
of fun. We have music in the lab, we go out when we discuss the issues that we're trying
to address in the lab. If my research turns out to be--my real true hope is to have our
work lead to the development of drugs that are non-invasive and that can complement behavioral
approaches in terms of addressing cognitive deficits in neurological disorders.
The reason why I think that young individuals should go into research if they're interested
is that it's a cool profession. You get to create your own questions and you get to answer
your own questions. You're the first one to explore that particular question, you're the
first one to get the knowledge if your hypothesis is correct or not. Again, working in a lab
is just a lot of fun. Its' very technical but you develop a lot of very strong bonds
with the people that you work with. It's a really fun profession. You really need the
ability to persevere but if you do I think it's just a very exciting, neat profession.