They have to contribute in some fundamental way to the ideas<\/em>. If you hire undergraduates as techs, where they\u2019re mostly doing the nuts and bolts, it\u2019s tricky deciding if they\u2019ve<\/p>\n made a sufficient contribution to warrant authorship. But since most of my work is done around the senior thesis, ideas usually originate jointly. The students and I bounce ideas off each other and reformulate them. It\u2019s a real give-and-take, so they have ownership of the ideas before they even start.<\/p>\n Using a rat model, much of your and your students\u2019 research focuses on behavior around opiate addiction.<\/strong><\/p>\n For a long time, the theory was that an addict was motivated by the aversive effects of withdrawal, what we call negative reinforcement: You take the drug to get rid of an aversive state. Later researchers, particularly Roy Wise, argued that positive reinforcement is critical: You take the drug because you like <\/em>it. My and others\u2019 work in the 1990s suggested that both reward and withdrawal are important.<\/p>\n Do the research topics change year to year in your lab?<\/strong><\/p>\n In science, you usually make a find and then build on it. I tend to jump around. The first research we did on Parkinson\u2019s disease was on NMDA receptors, special kinds of glutamate receptors that are heavily involved in learning. Then we switched to adenosine \u2014 completely unrelated, in some sense. This year we\u2019ve switched to opiates and cannabinoids! I think a lot of it is me. I get bored; let\u2019s jump around.<\/p>\n How do students react to this approach?<\/strong><\/p>\n I think students like to delve into something new each year instead of feeling that they\u2019re merely following up on Joe\u2019s result on NMDA receptors.<\/p>\n What do you do to attract students to neuroscience or psychology?<\/strong><\/p>\n One skill that I have, and I don\u2019t have many, is recognizing good students early on and getting them interested. If I hear that so-and-so is good but hasn\u2019t taken one of my classes, I\u2019ll twist their arm a bit.<\/p>\n What if a student has divergent interests? <\/strong><\/p>\n Katy Reedy \u201906 was interested in psychology and creative writing. I encouraged her, and she majored in psych and after graduation did research with my former student, Bill Carlezon ’86, director of the Behavioral Genetics Laboratory at Harvard\u2019s McLean Hospital. She\u2019s now in graduate school…in English! I do feel a little guilt \u2014 maybe if I hadn\u2019t been so pushy about neuroscience she would\u2019ve stayed in English at Bates.<\/p>\n On the other hand, my thesis student Lisa Genova ’92 got her Ph.D. in neuroscience and just wrote a novel, Still Alice<\/em>, about a fictional Harvard professor who develops Alzheimer\u2019s. It was recently bought by Simon & Schuster.<\/p>\n What\u2019s it like having a cadre of alums out there who\u2019ve been through your lab?<\/strong><\/p>\n When I go to the Society for Neuroscience and see 12 or 15 alums there, it\u2019s terrific. At a place like Bates, you wonder, “What\u2019s my legacy?” Research will be the legacy for some Bates faculty, and I publish regularly but it\u2019s not earth-shattering. Research won\u2019t be my legacy, as much as I would like it to be. It will be the alumni I\u2019ve taught.<\/p>\n What qualities do you seek when the psychology department hires a new member?<\/strong><\/p>\n A lot has to do with work ethic. We take this job and the students seriously, and we like and respect each other. We don\u2019t socialize as a department; we don\u2019t often meet that way. We basically do our job and we know everyone else is doing their job. So we have absolutely implicit trust in each other.<\/p>\n When you arrived in 1979, who modeled that ethic for you? <\/strong><\/p>\n Bob Moyer and Drake Bradley would get up at 4 a.m. to get in here. Bob would go home eventually but Drake would be here all night. It was pretty clear those two had nothing in their lives but Bates! Dick Wagner was the chair. He hired well and was such a good mediator; he got people to work together. And, he did the administrative stuff so we didn\u2019t have to futz with it. He protected us.<\/p>\n Were Drake and Bob here all hours for their students or their own research?<\/strong><\/p>\n It was mostly student-driven, but that\u2019s how we do our research. Research, teaching, and helping students are so commingled we can\u2019t differentiate among them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you\u2019re a student in Professor of Psychology John Kelsey\u2019s neuroscience laboratory,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":0,"parent":286,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_dimp_site_id":"","_dimp_override_contact":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"class_list":["post-298","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12272,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/298\/revisions\/12272"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/Images\/Bates_Magazine\/2008-summer\/departments\/Kelsey8944.jpg\")
\nProfessor of Psychology John Kelsey has been a member of the Bates faculty since 1979. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen.<\/strong><\/p>\n
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