Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy
Itzhak Fischer, Ph.D Chair

 

The Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the Drexel University College of Medicine provides an outstanding academic environment for pursuing multidisciplinary training and research in neuroscience.
The department has recently expanded by recruiting 6 new faculty members and has currently 36 research grants, including 26 NIH grants, with over $4 million in annual direct cost as well as several endowments. Recent grant awards included the renewal of the spinal cord Program Project, several major NIH grants and subcontracts.
The department offers postdoctoral training through a NIH training grants and graduate student training through the Neuroscience program for outstanding individuals preparing for a research career in the biomedical sciences.
The Department promotes a highly interactive and collaborative environment and shared facilities that encourages training, research and lab meetings outside the confines of one laboratory, thus providing flexibility and diversity in the training process.

Current faculty research interests include the following areas:

• Spinal Cord Research with emphasis on regeneration, neuroprotection and recovery of function after spinal cord injury.
• Cellular and Developmental Neurobiology with emphasis on neuronal cytoskeleton, guidance molecules, the neuromuscular junction, neuronal migration, and growth cones.
• System Neurobiology with emphasis on how circuits of neurons dynamically encode sensory and motor movement information.
• Joint Neuroengineering program with the Biomedical engineering school of Drexel University.
• Bone Biology Research with an emphasis on bone quality, structure and adaptation during growth, aging and disease.

Training can be obtained in all aspects of advanced microscopy and imaging, tissue culture, transplantation techniques, gene therapy and sequencing, behavioral neurobiology, kinematics, intracellular recording, patch clamping, computer modeling of neurobiological processes and robotics.
The Department has well equipped shared facilities for confocal microscopy, electron microscopy, image acquisition and processing, small animal surgery, behavioral analysis, biochemistry and molecular biology. Research training is also supplemented by a seminar series featuring faculty, postdoctoral fellows and outside speakers. Journal clubs and discussions of research findings are scheduled regularly and often shared among individual laboratories.
The Department is also responsible for 3 major courses given to medical students that include Medical Neuroscience, Gross Anatomy and MicroAnatomy.

For ongoing recruitment the Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy in the College of Medicine is inviting applications for tenure-track faculty positions (click here!) and postdoctoral fellowship funded by a NIH training grant (click here!).