Article archive / July 1, 2015
Originally published: . Volume 6, No. 7. Source pages: 11.
Drs. Jill Daniel’s and Edward Golob’s Brainy Work Featured in Tulane Magazine Article on Neuroscience
Drs. Jill Daniel and Edward Golob, researchers in neuroscience and faculty in the Tulane University Psychology Department, had their work featured in the June issue of Tulane Magazine, “Brain Signals: The Mysteries of the Brain Lead Tulane Researchers Down Paths of Discovery.”
Dr. Daniel is Professor in the Tulane Psychology Department and Director of the Neuroscience Program at Tulane.
Her and her team’s research aims to help understand the mechanisms of estrogens and androgens and how these impact areas of the brain, according to her website. This includes the importance of cognition and memory. She and her group of master’s and doctoral students look at the impact of hormones on both the brain and cognitive funcition across the lifespan. Daniel publishes in journals such as Psychopharmacology, Hormones and Behavior, and Endocrinology. With her efforts, she hopes to guide understanding of how hormones help organize mammalian brains as male or female, and also what impact these have on the aging brain.
Dr. Edward Golob is Associate Professor in the Psychology Department and focuses his research on aspects of hearing that are important to humans. Examples include determining a sound’s location and recognizing speech and music. His research and his lab students are focusing on how auditory processing is affected by attention, short-term memory, and the relations between perception and action, according to his site.
The group is working to understand the cognitive and neurobiological changes that accompany normal aging, Alzheimer's disease, and speech fluency disorders. To do this they monitor the brain’s electrical activity using EEG and study patterns while participants are performing cognitive tasks. According to their site, they are also study MRI-guided transcranial magnetic or electrical stimulation.
Musicians have to learn complicated musical parts. And their brains are demonstrably different from non- musicians’ brains. “We can literally see that,” says Golob.
“We have over 400 people in the Tulane community who are involved in the neuroscience endeavors,” says Daniel. The long- range goal is to create a Tulane Brain Institute.
… interdisciplinary work flourishes in four main areas of strength: hormones and the brain, cognition (learning, memory and attention), the autonomic nervous system and its disorders, and neurodegeneration.
This article is part of a historical newspaper archive. Read the original issue for its original layout, photographs and graphics.