Neuroscience Growth at Virginia Tech

Neuroscience Growth at Virginia Tech

Virginia Tech is a large, land grant university with a strong history of providing meaningful experiential learning opportunities to undergraduate students. This includes a long history of successful summer undergraduate research programs and NSF-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) programs.

Virginia Tech is in the midst of unprecedented growth in neurobiology-related research, training, and education.

In 2010, Virginia Tech opened the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC, an institute focused on translational, biomedical research with 16 neuroscience laboratories exploring brain development, function and disease. The focus of neuroscience at the institute is broad, spanning from cell and molecular neurobiology to clinical research in human populations. The institute’s neuroscientists are clustered into several centers, which include the Center for Neurobiology Research (CNR); directed by Anthony LaMantia; the Addiction Recovery Research Center (ARRC) directed by Warren Bickel; the Center for Health Behaviors Research (CHBR); directed by Warren Bickel; the Center for Human Neuroscience Research (CHNR), directed by Read Montague; the Neuromotor Research Clinic (NRC), directed by Sharon Ramey and Stephanie DeLuca; and the Center for Exercise Medicine Research (CEMR), directed by Zhen Yan.

Virginia Tech also recently established a first-of-its-kind School of Neuroscience. In its first year, the SON successfully recruited 6 tenure-track faculty, with many additional tenure-track faculty recruits expected over the next two years.

Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC and the Virginia Tech School of Neuroscience compliment existing strengths in neurobiology in the VT Department of Biological Sciences, the VT Department of Psychology, the College of Veterinary Medicine, the Biocomplexity Institute and the VT College of Engineering.

Taken together, this breadth of approaches and expertise makes neurobiology research and education at VT unique and exciting. Virginia Tech labs are studying the brain from genes to behavior, and at every level between, and incorporating undergraduate researchers in all of these studies.