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Anatomy
of a degree
Redefining doctorate in neuroscience to keep pace
with advances in field
By Tim Stoddard
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Mark Moss, a MED professor of medicine and chairman of the department of anatomy and neurobiology. Photo by Claire Folger |
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For neuroscientists such as Mark Moss, the past decade has often felt
like a scientific roller coaster, as discoveries in brain-related research
have soared, swooped, and swerved in unpredictable ways. It’s been
an exciting ride, but Moss and other researchers have an uneasy feeling
about where the discipline of neuroscience is going. The problem, he
says, is that while neuroscience is among the fastest growing scientific
disciplines, it is charging ahead without sufficient concern for the
rising generation of Ph.D.s, who may not be able to keep up with the
mushrooming body of knowledge.
“
How are we going to manage the exponential increase in information and
knowledge about the brain, and how should we disseminate it now as compared
to 20 years ago?” asks Moss, a MED professor of medicine and chairman
of the department of anatomy and neurobiology. “Right now, it’s
a haphazard system. We generate Ph.D.s and just send them out into academia.
The process relies more on tradition than on a shared vision of the purpose
of doctoral education. No one seems to know if there are problems with
the discipline.”
Moss and a team of faculty and graduate students
are working to change that. This fall, the MED department of anatomy
and neurobiology was selected
by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to participate
in the Carnegie Initiative on the Doctorate (CID), a multiyear research
program aimed at invigorating doctoral education in six disciplines:
history, English, education, mathematics, chemistry, and neuroscience.
The 51 CID partner sites at universities around the country will begin
an extensive review process to clarify the goals of doctoral education
in their respective disciplines, and will experiment with new teaching
methods to better meet these goals.
Moss’ team is one of eight CID
partners focusing on neuroscience. With Todd Hoagland, a MED assistant
professor of anatomy and neurobiology,
Peter Bergethon, a MED adjunct assistant professor of biochemistry, Dan
Roe, a postdoctoral fellow, and graduate student Maureen Estevez (MED’07),
Moss will begin by identifying the mission of the doctorate and master’s
degree programs in anatomy and neurobiology at BU. “It’s
an experiment,” Moss says. “We’re trying to reevaluate
how the doctorate in anatomy can be best applied to our present educational
system and to society. The fundamental question is, what does the doctorate
mean now?”
Traditionally, he says, a Ph.D. in neuroscience was a
one-way ticket to academia, where an individual would continue with teaching
and research,
and specialize in anything from large scale studies of behavior and neuroimaging
to the cellular level in neurophysiology. “Now I think there is
some issue about what we are actually arming our Ph.D. candidates with
in terms of their ability to get jobs,” he says. “Neuroscience
is perhaps the most rapidly growing discipline in terms of the number
of Ph.D.s being produced. So are there enough jobs for these individuals
in the traditional academic medical track that they’re being prepared
for?”
One issue the team will address is whether an individual
with a Ph.D. in anatomy should be teaching at the undergraduate level,
in medical
and dental schools, or even in high schools. Another is whether doctoral
programs focus too much on preparing experts instead of teachers. “We’re
running out of people to teach in the biomedical sciences,” Moss
says. “In many cases, there are not people to replace the last
generation of teachers.”
To help reverse that trend, the department
is now developing a teacher training module for master’s and Ph.D.
candidates in anatomy and neurobiology, called the Vesalius program (named
after the 16th-century
Belgian father of anatomy). “Before we applied for the CID, our
department had already been thinking about alternative tracks for the
Ph.D. in neuroscience,” Moss says. “One of them was developing
teaching expertise in the biomedical sciences.” Vesalius students
serve as teaching fellows in the MED and SDM courses of gross anatomy,
neuroscience, and histology. Moss says the program will someday expand
into a more extensive teacher-training program in other disciplines too. “We’re
hoping that it will be adopted as a model by other basic sciences and
clinical departments within BU. We’ve also had inquiries about
the program from other schools around the country.”
As Moss’ team
dissects the doctorate, it will report its findings at annual meetings
of the CID partners. The long-term goal is to have
other neuroscience programs adopt the lessons learned through the initiative,
Moss says, and to ensure that the discipline is represented by both well-trained
teachers and skilled researchers. “Education in neuroscience is
not limited simply to an evolving body of factual knowledge,” he
says. “It includes the integral art and cognitive skills that underlie
it. It’s more than just the facts. It’s the processes that
evolve for successful teaching.”
7
November 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations