URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Winter_2015_Melissa-McCarthy

Bringing Neuroscience and Diversity Together

by John Pantalone

Serendipity arrived on campus with Alycia Mosley Austin in 2010. She earned her doctoral degree in neuroscience just as the University of Rhode Island (URI) faculty completed a proposal for a graduate Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program (INP). The Graduate School hired her as the director of graduate student recruitment and diversity initiatives. Austin also is an adjunct assistant professor in biological sciences. She “fell into” her third job as coordinator of the INP because she has experience in recruiting students from underrepresented groups and the science background to fit the INP. “Austin made the big difference for the program,” says Nasser Zawia, dean of the Graduate School and the driving force behind the INP. “She was a recent graduate with a background in neuroscience. She understood all of it. We were lucky to have her when we established the INP.” Though she hadn’t expected the opportunity when she took her job at URI, Austin became the critical link between prospective graduate students and the innovative neuroscience program. Three years later, as coordinator, she recruits students and mentors them as they go through the program. She meets regularly with faculty to review various aspects of the program and to work on the curriculum.

“It was happenstance,” Austin says, but in hindsight she seems to have been heading in this direction all along. Born in New York, and raised in New Jersey, Austin had her initial Rhode Island experience as an undergraduate in neuroscience at Brown University. She earned her master’s degree and her doctorate at the University of California at San Diego, a path she determined for herself when she was a junior high school student. “I was always interested in science, and I had done pre-college programs when I was in high school,” she says. “I found that I really enjoyed research in the lab and fieldwork.” She moved in the direction of brain science, partly from reading about President George H.W. Bush declaring the 1990s the “decade of the brain.” Her natural interest in science combined with publicity about brain research led her to Brown University and neuroscience. “Discovering how the brain works is an end in itself,” Austin says. “Once you know how it works, you can relate it to all sorts of disorders and diseases.” That, of course, is the focus of the research being done by URI scientists in the INP.

The University of Rhode Island { momentum: Research & Innovation }

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