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Tiffany Moore, a recent PhD from UNMC's College of Nursing, recently published a study on premature infants in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit that utilized the resources of UNO's Endocrine Bioservices Laboratory, supervised by Jeffrey French, Director of UNO's Neuroscience Program. The paper will be published in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Pediatric Gastroenterology and Nutrition. Coauthors on the paper include Dr. French from UNO, and Drs. Margaret Wilson, Kendra Schmid, Ann Anderson-Berry, and Ann Berger from UNMC's College of Nursing.

The study addressed the important question of feeding intolerance (FI) in premature infants. Some proportion of 'premies' develop an inability to appropriately process food delivered orally, and the problem can lead to long-term developmental morbidity in infants or even death. Moore's study evaluated the potential for predicting whether a premature infant would develop FI based on metabolic biomarkers measured in noninvasively collected samples (urine and saliva). Infants that ultimately developed FI had significantly lower levels of the metabolically-important hormone CORTISOL on the first day of life, and tended to have lower levels of 8-OHdG (8-hydroxydeoxyguanasine) a marker of oxidative stress at the same time point. Although the sample size was small, the results point to the potential usefulness of these noninvasively collected biomarkers for predicting health outcomes (especially feeding intolerance) in the remarkably at-risk population of premature infants.

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Neuroscience

The study of the biological basis of behavior is one of the most rapidly growing
areas of life sciences, reflecting the importance of the fundamental and applied interest in how neurons work on an individual basis, and how collections of neurons mediate behavior  and cognition.

The College of Arts and Sciences at UNO has established the first undergraduate neuroscience degree program in the Nebraska system to educate students bound for graduate programs in neuroscience as well as various careers in the health or health-related fields.

Students working toward completion of this degree will benefit from the expertise of existing faculty in the UNO departments of Biology and Psychology along one of two tracks:  Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience or Integrative Behavioral Science.

An undergraduate major in neuroscience will place students in the position of
moving into one of multiple career trajectories upon completion of the degree.

First, graduates of the program will be in an excellent position to immediately and successfully be recruited by one of the more than 200 graduate programs in neuroscience and related areas, and pursue advanced degrees. These opportunities include working with faculty at UNMC’s growing training programs and opportunities.  The newly established Department of Pharmacology and Experimental  Neuroscience at UNMC brings together experts in neuropharmacology with those with expertise in neurodegenerative diseases, and new and exciting graduate programs are likely to emerge from this new department. Neuroscience and related disciplines constitute among the best funded and active programs at UNMC. The Center for Neurovirology and Neurodegenerative Disorders (CNND) and the associated Neuroscience Research Training Program (NRTP) at UNMC constitute an important employment and training outlet for graduates of an undergraduate neuroscience major.

Second, graduates from either of the proposed neuroscience tracks would have most or all of the required courses for admission to medical schools, veterinary programs, and a host of other health-related professional programs.

Third, graduates of the neuroscience major will possess intellectual and methodological skill-sets that will make them highly attractive for laboratory technicians and assistants in local, regional, and national university and medical school laboratories.

Fourth, the growing emphasis on pharmaceutical agents that affect psychological function is driving employment in corporate pharmaceutical firms, for which graduates of the neuroscience major would be competitive.

Finally, students will emerge from the major with the ability to think across disciplines, to formulate questions and seek answers, to interpret data and draw conclusions, and to effectively communicate the outcome of these processes to a target audience. This suite of skills will make neuroscience majors eligible for a variety of career opportunities that are outside of the discipline of neuroscience.