ISSUED: 30 May 2023
MEDIA CONTACT: Dana Costa
SHEPHERDSTOWN, WV — Faculty and students at Shepherd University are excited about the role Shepherd will play in neuroscience research that will take place under a $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR). Shepherd will receive $945,458 of the grant money over the next five years for research and community outreach.
“That money is going to be used to establish a program for Shepherd undergraduates where they can actively participate in neuroscience research,” said Dr. Conor Sipe, assistant professor of biology, who will oversee the research.
Dr. Conor Sipe shows students Ronaida Ammari and Erika Voges how the confocal microscope works.
The grant will provide stipends for students who help conduct research during the academic year and in the summer. It will also give them opportunities to do research at other institutions participating in the grant—West Virginia University, Marshall University, and West Virginia State University. Shepherd’s portion of the grant will support five to six students per calendar year and cover stipends for about 45 undergraduate positions over the five-year period.
Sipe studies how organisms develop. He uses fruit flies to look at how the nervous system develops, how the brain is built, the role of nutrients in controlling stem cells, and what happens when a fly larvae’s food supply is disrupted.
“The reason we’re doing this in flies is because they have a fairly simple brain that shares a lot of characteristics with a human brain,” Sipe said. “There are two hemispheres, they have a spinal cord like structure, their stem cells behave very similarly, and the same genes are at work in those cells. So, it’s a good model system for understanding human development.”
The National Institutes of Health recently donated a Leica confocal microscope to the College of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics that will play a major role in research supported by the grant. The microscope uses a laser light projected through a pinhole to create much sharper and more detailed images of cells than a conventional microscope.
Dr. Robert Warburton, dean, College of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics said NSF grant money will be used to make further improvements to the College’s infrastructure.
“Some of our labs will be upgraded, some of our equipment will be upgraded, we’ll be getting a set of instruments that will complement the confocal,” he said. “So, within the next five years or so with this grant the facilities for faculty and student research and collaboratives are going to improve.”
Biology majors Ronaida Ammari and Erika Voges, both from Inwood, West Virginia, are helping Sipe with his research and believe the work they are doing, and the addition of the confocal microscope, will benefit them in the future. After graduating from Shepherd, Ammari plans to attend medical school and specialize in pathology.
“Pathologists work a lot with cells and body tissues, so this is a great experience for me because that’s exactly what I’m doing—I’m looking at cells,” Ammari said. “I’m working with fruit fly tissues, and it’s a really valuable experience to do this research. I think it’s amazing that we get to see the cells in much more detail than we did before. I’m really excited.”
Voges’s hopes to become a marine biologist, so she wants to be well-rounded and learn as much as she can during her time at Shepherd.
“It’s going to benefit me in many ways. It’s going to help me create a well-rounded expertise in many different aspects of biology,” she said. “It’s going to allow me to visualize cells in a way that most people don’t get to experience hands-on as opposed to seeing in lecture slides. Being able to work on it [the confocal microscope], get experience with it, and learn from it is going to be amazing.”
Community outreach
Dr. Qing Wang, professor of mathematics, will manage the portion of the grant that covers community outreach to students and educators. Plans include developing a weeklong summer camp for high school students in grades 10 and 11 and science teachers that focuses on neuroscience.
“We would like to pair each student with a high school science teacher, and we plan for them to learn the basics in data science and neuroscience,” Wang said. “We would like to prepare a research project for the two to complete.”
Wang said the grant will support eight high school students and eight high school science teachers each year and will provide the teachers with training in data science and neuroscience as well as materials that they can use in their classrooms.
Seminars for Shepherd students that connect them with professionals from area government agencies and industries in neuroscience are also planned. The seminars will build upon a current National Science Foundation grant-funded program that brings professionals to Shepherd to talk with students about topics like job and internship opportunities, writing resumes, job interview skills, and skills needed to do a job.
“I am so happy that Shepherd is part of this grant because it’s a statewide project that combines research, education, and career development,” Wang said. “Data science and neuroscience are really the new areas for growth and opportunity in the near future.”
“We have an aging population,” Warburton said. “What neuroscience is trying to figure out is things like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease and dementia that are becoming more prevalent as the population ages. Also, on the other hand, there’s developmental biology. It’s up and coming because we now have the skillset and the equipment to look at things at a neurological level.”
Listen to Conor Sipe and Qing Wang talk about neuroscience research
Grant background
West Virginia has been awarded a highly competitive five-year $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) that will boost academic scientific research and upgrade infrastructure at West Virginia University, Marshall University, West Virginia State University, and Shepherd University. EPSCoR is facilitated by the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission’s Division of Science, Technology & Research. This funding establishes the West Virginia Network for Functional Neuroscience and Transcriptomics, a statewide collaboration of neuroscientists and bioinformaticists working to position West Virginia as a center for impactful neuroscience research.
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