Largest Group of Slug Lab Researchers Attend International Neuroscience Conference

In November, seven student researchers attended the 2023 Society for Neuroscience annual conference in Washington, D.C., to present memory research conducted with Aplysia californica—a type of sea slug—in Dominican’s Behavioral Neuroscience Lab, more commonly known as the Slug Lab. It was the largest Dominican cohort to attend the conference to date.

Bryan Gonzalez Delgadillo, Elise Gamino, Anna Kurkowski, Nelly Musajeva, Leslie Valdez and Diana Wittrock explored whether forgetting is an active process that can be manipulated pharmacologically, while Zayra Juarez, Theresa Wilsterman and Jashui Zárate Torres examined if sustaining memories over long periods requires changes in gene expression.

The students were accompanied by Drs. Bob and Irina Calin-Jageman, who oversee the Slug Lab.

“Presenting at the Society for Neuroscience meeting gave DU students a chance to share their research results with an international neuroscience community,” Bob Calin-Jageman said, noting that 30,000 people attended the event over five days. “For these junior scientists, this helped them fully realize all their hard work and see their science as part of the ongoing conversation about learning and memory and how it works in the brain.”

Valdez, a senior neurobiology major interested in clinical research, said sharing her lab findings with experts in their fields was “exhilarating.”

“It was nice meeting people who share the same interest as me and to explore other areas of neuroscience,” she said.