A Message from the Director

AUTHOR : Dr. Kathy Murphy

A few weeks ago, our students spent the day documenting A Day in the Life of a MiNDS student. Once an hour, they stopped and took a picture. The collection of pictures is funny, and include pics of cats and dogs, students exercising, riding the bus, and meeting with fellow students. But most show our students hard at work. The pictures capture the wide variety of research projects that MiNDS students are doing. They work on cell culture preps, pour through data files, examine neurons under the microscope, make a see-through brain, test subjects, and finalize software that will bring better mental health care to people in Africa. The pictures made me smile and laugh, but more than anything, they made me proud to be the Director of MiNDS.

Our students have transformed Neuroscience research at McMaster by knitting together a diverse group of neuroscientists into a strong academic community. As one of my colleagues put it "MiNDS simply works" and the reason is that the 56 current students and 80 grads have built links among the labs to support cutting edge Neuroscience research.

MiNDS has wonderful students and top researchers. The A Day in the Life pictures capture the uniqueness of our program, and are being used to make a recruiting video for MiNDS. I hope to share that video with you in the next newsletter.