Dr. Neil Harrison

Dr. Neil Harrison is the director of the C.V. Starr Laboratory for Molecular Neuropharmacology and former director of the Graduate Program in Neuroscience at the Weill Graduate School of Medical Sciences.

The Right Start

A great graduate education is made up of good teaching and good lab research opportunities. We work hard to provide our students with both. We recruit students from a wide variety of schools and, in many cases, many different countries, so our incoming class is quite heterogeneous. What I try to do as director is to create a first semester course that brings everybody up to speed. It's designed to give the students perspective on the history of neuroscience -- its origins and its context -- while introducing some fundamental problems and principles. In the second semester, we offer a series of more traditional, graduate school-style courses. In this way, we bridge the gap between the typical undergraduate experience and the traditional graduate school teaching experience. This works very well for our students.

Community of Learners

We've designed our first year courses so that students are encouraged to interact with one another. It's no accident that our third year students, for example, have tremendous esprit. After all, a lot of them were recruited together. They've socialized and attended class together, so they've become a close-knit group. That's crucial because later, in the lab, they'll need one another's support. Things move at a very quick pace here -- after all, it's New York -- so the stronger relationships students have with their peers and the stronger their support groups, the better their chances of success.