“What’s lost or gained if we actually concede that humans are machines, and what is lost or gained if we concede that machines can become human?”

Roll these questions around in your mind for a minute, and you’ll get a sense of what makes �ֲ���ý’ approach to teaching neuroscience distinctive. As exemplified in a recent talk by Nancy Koven, John E. Kelsey Professor of Neuroscience, it’s an approach that considers not just the science of neuroscience, but the cultural context into which that science and its subjects are inextricably woven.

The �ֲ���ý neuroscience program, perhaps uniquely, points “specifically to the value of humanistic inquiry to help students evaluate the context in which neuroscience operates,” Koven said in the Oct. 25 talk that celebrated her appointment as the inaugural Kelsey Professor.

Nancy Koven delivers her address, “Stories of Neuroscience,” celebrating her appointment as the John E. Kelsey Professor of Neuroscience on Oct. 25. (Rene Roy for �ֲ���ý College)

Titled “Stories of Neuroscience,” Koven’s address was the centerpiece of a crowded and festive gathering that, as President Clayton Spencer indicated in her welcome, had every reason to rock. “The celebration of a professorship is always one of the most significant moments in the life of a college,” she said, “and today’s celebration is particularly rich because it is multi-generational in multiple ways.”

First, the new professorship honors John Kelsey, who came to �ֲ���ý in 1979, taught and conducted research for 34 years, and, in Spencer’s words, became “a distinguished and beloved member of the �ֲ���ý faculty who had an outsized impact on the life of the college and the lives of many, many students.”

Kelsey, who was on hand for the occasion (and lent a hand too, helping to set out extra seats as the room filled up), played a definitive role in establishing �ֲ���ý’ Program in Neuroscience, which Koven chairs.

In Koven, Spencer continued, the Kelsey Professorship honors “a current faculty member who upholds these traditions of commitment and generosity in every aspect of her work — teaching, research, and service.”

Sally Kelsey and her husband, Professor Emeritus of Psychology John Kelsey — namesake of the new �ֲ���ý professorship— chat with another table prior to Nancy Koven’s address on Oct. 25. (Rene Roy for �ֲ���ý College)

And the professorship itself, announced last spring, was the gift of a family “with long ties over many decades to �ֲ���ý”: the Bonneys, represented at Koven’s talk by members of three generations, including the couple who endowed the Kelsey professorship, trustee chair Michael J. Bonney ’80 and Alison Grott Bonney ’80.

Using his introduction to offer a primer on Kelsey, Koven, and the neuroscience program itself, Dean of the Faculty Malcolm Hill summarized the program as “one which today provides students with a deep understanding of the relationship between the nervous system and behavior, but also the historical, political, and ethical context in which neuroscience operates.

“This is important in our liberal arts context here at �ֲ���ý.”

A �ֲ���ý professor since 2006, Koven is a clinical neuropsychologist who studies connections between brain regions and cognitive and emotional functions. Her address did uphold its title with a couple of stories, including one about an early lesson about tribal hierarchies in the medical establishment.

The audience fills the Keck Classroom in Pettengill Hall for Nancy Koven’s talk, “Stories of Neuroscience” on Oct. 25, 2018. (Rene Roy for �ֲ���ý College)

But the heart of the talk was a sampler of student work at the intersection of neuroscience and what Koven called humanistic inquiry — a means of enriching a discipline, she explained, that can otherwise be reductive to a fault, treat brains as disembodied phenomena, and fail to see its own reflection in its conclusions.

“In essence,” she said, “we simplify the complexity of a person into variables that we care most about, hope that we’re capturing the essentials, average those essentials with those from other stripped-down people, hope that the resulting data that’s really no one is really everyone, and then tip-toe quietly around this question of what to do with all those juicy leftovers.”

With science fiction common to both, a first-year seminar and an upper-level seminar that Koven created provided examples of the humanistic approach in action.

Offered in 2016, the FYS engaged new “students from the get-go with lines of humanistic inquiry,” she explained. Last winter’s upper-level course, “Embodied Cognition, Technoculture, and Future of Identity,” provided a “culturally critical lens” for students already well-versed in neuroscience.

John E. Kelsey Professor of Neuroscience Nancy Kelsey meets with neuroscience major Adelae Durand ’19 of Cumberland, R.I., in Koven’s lab on Oct. 11, 2018. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Why science-fi? It’s a genre that “prompt[s] a realization for the reader that the here-and-now of our world does not have to be the way it is,” and ideally liberates readers to ask challenging questions. Another commonality between the courses is that Koven asks her students in both to undertake creative work in a variety of media.

“What mental phenomena might we police?”

In the FYS, for instance, “I asked students to conceptualize a piece of future neurotechnology, and to think about commercialization by marketing this fictitious concept in the format of a Victorian-era ad,” she said.

In both courses, she assigned students to find two real examples of “body technologies that have implications for cognition, emotion, sensation, perception, or movement” — with one example being something sanctioned by medical neuroscience, and the other representing “body hacking,” where people install technology into their bodies independent of the medical establishment.

The body-hacking example was a “third ear” — an ear-shaped growth on an that is equipped with a microphone and wifi to enable, “basically, a global sharing of a person’s immediate soundscape.” Its medically approved counterpoint was a deep-brain stimulator, implanted in people with conditions such as epilepsy, that both monitors brain activity and applies an electrical pulse as needed to avert possible seizures.

Michael Bonney ’80, chair of the �ֲ���ý Board of Trustees, in conversation prior to Nancy Koven’s address Oct. 25 celebrating her appointment as Kelsey Professor of Neuroscience. Bonney and his wife, Alison Grott Bonney ’80, endowed the Kelsey chair. (Rene Roy for �ֲ���ý College)

“What I deeply appreciate” about that example, Koven said, was a question that it raised for the student who submitted it, Claire MacKay ’20: “While this device addresses troubling symptoms of a disease, it is nonetheless a vehicle by which to impose electrical norms in the brain. What mental phenomena might we police?” That was one of many provocative student queries that Koven shared and that, in and of themselves, were one of the most engaging aspects of the talk.

An outstanding example of student creative work came from the upper-level course and Koven’s challenge to create a so-called body-shopping catalog for consumers in a future “in which the body is an optional mode of existence and is, as such, deliberately constructed and customized.”

Julie Stitt Self ’18 and Lindsey Beauregard ’18 rose to the challenge by creating a faux Amazon.com site that took themes from the course and set them in a commercial context. With one of their imaginary products, the customer can be re-embodied in literature: “Feel like you always have your head stuck in a book? Try your whole body. Swap out your meat bag and become a body of literature instead.”

“It opens the door for people, now bodies of information, to be uploaded into digital beings.”

The site came complete with Amazon verisimilitude in the form of apparatus such as customer reviews. “Generally love this product,” said one review. “Not only can I keep immaculate records of my memories, but I can also write myself into a new fantasy whenever I choose.”

Koven introduces her audience to a theme that has emerged from her students’ work: the relentless thinning of the wall between human and machine. (Rene Roy for �ֲ���ý College)

That project speaks to one of the broader themes that emerged from the student work: the relentless thinning of the wall between human and machine, and a mind-bending projection of that trend. Digitalization, Koven said, “reinforces the idea that bodies can be read as information, opening the door for human beings to be rendered in code.

“For excited futurists, it opens the door for people, now bodies of information, to be uploaded into digital beings. A wide-scale leaving-behind of what some see as a perennial problem of the body would constitute a digital diaspora. Digital uploading also invites the idea of digital downloading, and it promises immortality either way,” as the body-shopping notion suggests.

Still, the prospect of a digital diaspora “is fraught territory,” Koven noted, especially among those who have worked so hard to defend their identities here in the realm of flesh and blood. She said, “Looking forward can sometimes seem like a dereliction of duty to the past and to the present.”

But not when it comes to teaching and learning neuroscience at �ֲ���ý. Koven concluded that “a vital part of undergraduate neuroscience is to look at brains — yes, absolutely to look at brains — but to also look at how we look at brains, and to contemplate the kind of cultural icon the brain has become.

“I think humanistic lines of inquiry help up do this kind of work, and I’m delighted to be part of a developing �ֲ���ý neuroscience story that recognizes this.”

From left, John Kelsey, Nancy Koven, Michael Bonney ’80, and Alison Grott Bonney ’80 pose for a photo after Koven’s talk. The Bonneys’ gift endowed the new neuroscience professorship held by Koven and named in honor of Kelsey, a member of the psychology faculty for 34 years. (Rene Roy for �ֲ���ý College)

A member of the �ֲ���ý faculty since 2006, Nancy Koven is the inaugural holder of the John E. Kelsey Professorship in Neuroscience.

Endowed by Michael J. Bonney ’80 and Alison Grott Bonney ’80, this new professorship honors Professor Emeritus of Psychology John Kelsey and his foundational contributions to the Program in Neuroscience during his 37 years on the faculty, and it recognizes a faculty member who exemplifies the supportive, innovative, and learning-by-doing approach to neuroscience teaching and research at �ֲ���ý.

Nancy Koven explains what the appointment means to her:

The generosity of the Bonney family seemingly knows no bounds! They already have had such a powerfully transformative impact on the entire �ֲ���ý community��— past, present, and future��— and, as if that were not inspiring enough, they have named this new professorship in honor of one of the most transformative professors to ever teach at �ֲ���ý: John Kelsey.

I am delighted to see John recognized in this way, and I’m humbled to be the first holder of the Kelsey Professorship.

During an end-of-year “follies” reception for neuroscience faculty and their seniors, John E. Kelsey Professor of Neuroscience Nancy Koven (right) and neuroscience colleague Laura Ligouri (left) react as Lindsey Beauregard ’18 of Hollis, N.H., offers an alternative career idea for Koven. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

When I first stepped foot onto the �ֲ���ý campus over a decade ago, I was surprised by an uncanny sense of having returned rather than having just arrived.

Professor Emeritus of Psychology John Kelsey was a �ֲ���ý teacher and researcher for 37 years.

John and colleagues in the Department of Psychology welcomed me like family, and the overall rapport among �ֲ���ý faculty and staff, the rich integration of campus and community, and the close working relationships between faculty and students were, and still are, vital to that sense of belonging.

Over this past decade, the Program in Neuroscience has grown in size and expanded in exciting, new interdisciplinary directions, but the foundational ideal that John Kelsey put into place��— that there is considerable joy in communal learning, creative exploration, and hard work��— remains vibrant.

About Nancy Koven

John E. Kelsey Professor of Neuroscience Nancy Koven, who chairs the Program in Neuroscience, teaches core and advanced courses as well as a First-Year Seminar on the intersection of neuroscience and literature. Koven’s research in neuropsychiatry examines brain structure and function in the context of adult mental health, focusing on the complex interplay between the roles of cognition and emotion in human behavior.

A past recipient of the Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching, she routinely includes student collaborators in her research, which has been funded through grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Maine Institute for Human Genetics and Health.

Somewhere tonight, someone — make that millions of someones — will wake up in desperate terror, reliving the horror of a traumatic event. The someones will range from combat veterans and abuse survivors to witnesses to mass-shootings and victims of natural disasters.

Right now, there’s nothing they can do except let the panic dissipate, like waiting out a summer thunderstorm. But in the near future, a remedy might be literally within reach, thanks to landmark memory research by Ed Meloni ’91.

Picture this: Sitting on the bedstand of that someone is a xenon-gas inhaler. The sufferer breathes deeply from the inhaler. And poof: Not only is the traumatic memory gone, but so is the associated and sometimes debilitating condition known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Ed Meloni ’91 speaks to students in Professor of Neuroscience Nancy Koven’s course on embodied cognition during his mid-March visit as the College Key Distinguished Alumnus in Residence. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

In any given year, more than eight million Americans suffer from PTSD, which develops in some people who have experienced a traumatic personal event. Most people probably know something about PTSD through its depiction in popular culture, particularly war movies. Early on, in 1946, there was the post-World War II movie Best Years of Their Lives, then movies like Coming Home, Born on the Fourth of July, and The Hurt Locker, all of which portray PTSD sufferers.

The nightmares and flashbacks — two — feel very real. In one way, they are, and that’s the key to Meloni’s research on xenon gas as a potential treatment.

at Harvard-affiliated McLean Hospital, where he works alongside , director of the hospital’s Behavioral Genetics Laboratory. During his visit to �ֲ���ý in March as the College Key’s Distinguished Alumnus in Residence, Meloni joined neuroscience classes, met with students, and delivered an evening lecture. He and I spoke for about an hour.

Researchers, Meloni explained, used to believe that “recalling a memory was like reading a file.” It was read, then put back. “We thought memories were immutable.” Meloni and other scientists have shown that’s not the case. “Our memories can be changed; new information can be integrated.”

(In fact, Meloni says, “our memories are probably not faithful representations of what really happened,” which has great implications for the reliability of crime eyewitnesses, a field of research by �ֲ���ý psychology professor Amy Douglass.)

This process of memory retrieval and updating is known as reconsolidation, and Meloni is an expert in the field. In 2014, he and colleagues at McLean showed that xenon gas can block the reconsolidation of fearful memories in lab rats, effectively eliminating the fear. The discovery garnered national attention for its promise to end PTSD suffering.

Now, the promise is getting close to reality.

PTSD can affect military service members who experience a traumatic event in combat. (U.S. Air Force photo/Tech. Sgt. Nadine Barclay)

For a discovery that could bear directly on human life, the route to finding it was “indirect,” Meloni says. “It was chance and serendipity.” (And, we would add, also some creative thinking on his part.)

As the story goes, a colleague of Meloni’s was presenting research data at a conference, where he learned that a medical gas company was interested in providing a device that would allow scientists to use xenon gas in their rat-model experiments on neurodegenerative diseases.

“You can’t just get a rat to put a mask on.”

The device was needed because “gases are hard to work with” in research that uses a rat model, Meloni explains. “There are a lot of intricacies with gas delivery. It’s not as simple as giving a drug. You can’t just get a rat to put a mask on.”

So the medical gas company funded a research apparatus at McLean, the first of its kind in the world, to test the effects of xenon gas on a rat model.

In terms of its general medical use, xenon is hardly new; though expensive, it’s considered a superior anesthetic and is used in diagnostic imaging. And in recent years, new research indicated that xenon could be “neuroprotective” in the brain, Meloni says, a general term meaning that it might protect nerve cells from the kind of damage found in neurodegenerative diseases and traumatic brain injuries, such as concussion.

The unique research device in place, Meloni was initially part of an unrelated study that yielded “a strong signal” that xenon was indeed neuroprotective. Specifically, xenon is an “NMDA receptor antagonist” that protects the brain from an insult, glutamate excitotoxicity.

That led Meloni to wonder: If xenon is an NMDA receptor antagonist, it should block learning and memory because that’s the outcome when animals are given drugs that block the NMDA receptor. “They don’t learn,” he says. “Or, they stop fearing something they learned.”

“I just wanted to test that,” Meloni says. And among myriad tests involving xenon, rats, and fear, three results proved pivotal. First, they found that giving xenon gas to rats prevented them from developing a certain fear, in this case the fear of a mild shock. “We blocked the learning of fear,” Meloni recalls.

“I was floored,” Meloni says. “That was the home run.”

At this point, Meloni’s expertise in memory reconsolidation kicked in. He thought, “What if the animals are already afraid? Can xenon block a memory that was already there?”

So Meloni decided to pair the administration of gas with the reactivation of a fearful memory (in this case, a mild shock) that the rats had learned by Pavlovian association. When the fear was reactivated, in this case by the sound of a tone previously paired with the shock, the rats were immediately exposed to xenon gas. Tested a few days later — even weeks later — ��they did not show fear when the tone was presented.

“I was floored,” Meloni says. “That was the home run.”

Xenon gas fills a discharge tube shaped like the element’s atomic symbol. (Photograph by Pslawinski [CC BY-SA 2.5], via Wikimedia Commons)

Last summer, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office gave Meloni and fellow researcher Marc Kaufman a — essentially a patent approval — for using xenon gas to treat PTSD. The biotech firm Nobilis Therapeutics has licensed the patent and seeks to develop a hand-held medical device for self-administration of xenon.

The hand-held device “is absolutely critical,” Meloni says. “If a medical professional identifies that you might benefit from xenon therapy, you want to administer it as soon as the traumatic memory is reactivated, which happens “organically, out in the real world,” Meloni notes, in nightmares, flashbacks, or by exposure to cues that remind the patient of the traumatic event, much like when the tone is presented to the fear-conditioned rats. “That’s when we think you’re going to get the most therapeutic effect.”

Of course, FDA approval is still required. “Up until now, there’s been no FDA-approved way to administer xenon gas aside from an elaborate anesthesia machine” in a medical setting, Meloni explains. At the moment, Meloni and colleagues are awaiting the go-ahead from the FDA to begin clinical human trials at McLean.

John Kelsey “activated my brain,” Meloni says.

If Meloni has shown smart and creative thinking in his xenon research, it’s safe to say those abilities were cultivated by his �ֲ���ý professors. A student in the days before �ֲ���ý developed its neuroscience program, Meloni designed his own interdisciplinary major to combine interests in biology and psychology.

Meloni wanted to study the brain, and “psychology alone didn’t quite fit the bill because the brain is a biological organism. Everything of the mind is derived from the biology of the brain — our cognition, how we feel — so I went with biology of the brain plus psychology: biopsychology.”

On the bio side, mentors included Pam Baker ’69, now retired, and Lee Abrahamsen. On the psych side, it was John Kelsey. (Also retired, Kelsey was recently honored with the creation of a new endowed professorship in his name, the John E. Kelsey Professorship in Neuroscience.)

As a faculty mentor, John Kelsey “activated my brain,” says Ed Meloni ’91. Here, at the 2014 Mount David Summit, Kelsey hugs friend and colleague Kathy Low, professor of psychology. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Kelsey “activated my brain,” Meloni says. “He forced you to think constructively and creatively and to problem-solve, to figure it out.”

For Meloni, a common denominator among his professors was “friendliness. �ֲ���ý professors take the time to get to know you personally and make sure you’re absorbing the material. They’re teachers, plus something more.”

Those �ֲ���ý qualities are invoked a lot because they’re valuable. ��“For an underclassman, that’s just so big. It’s so inspiring. It just resonates.”

�ֲ���ý has announced faculty promotions, including tenure awards and full professorships, effective for the 2016-17 academic year.

“These promotions recognize the achievements of faculty members who personify what it means to be an outstanding teacher and scholar at �ֲ���ý College,” said Matthew Auer, vice president for academic affairs and dean of the faculty.

“These faculty members teach with passion and purpose, they cross academic and scholarly boundaries with skill, and they are fully engaged members of our liberal arts community and leaders in the academy.”

Recommended by the faculty’s Committee on Personnel and approved by the �ֲ���ý College Board of Trustees, the promotions have been awarded to faculty members in the fields of dance, economics, English, environmental studies, politics, psychology, and religious studies.

Promotions to associate professor with tenure

+Eden Osucha

Eden Osucha has been promoted to associate professor of English at �ֲ���ý. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Rachel Boggia

Rachel Boggia has been promoted to associate professor of dance at �ֲ���ý. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Senem Aslan

Senem Aslan has been promoted to associate professor of politics at �ֲ���ý. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Clarisa Pérez-Armendáríz

Clarisa Pérez-Armendáríz has been promoted to associate professor of politics at �ֲ���ý. (Mike Bradley/�ֲ���ý College)

+Paul Shea

Paul Shea has been promoted to associate professor of economics at �ֲ���ý. (Mike Bradley/�ֲ���ý College)

+Nate Tefft

Nathan Tefft has been promoted to associate professor of economics at �ֲ���ý. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

Promotions to full professor

+Cynthia Baker

Cynthia Baker has been promoted to professor of religious studies at �ֲ���ý. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Holly Ewing

Holly Ewing (center) has been promoted to professor of environmental studies at �ֲ���ý. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Sylvia Federico

Sylvia Federico has been promoted to professor of English at �ֲ���ý. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

+Nancy Koven

Nancy Koven (center) has been promoted to professor of psychology at �ֲ���ý. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

Associate Professor of Psychology Nancy Koven works with Jason DeFelice ’17 of Salem, N.H., and Julia Rice ’16 of Providence, R.I., to analyze brain images during their cognitive neuroscience class on Sept. 24, 2015. (Josh Kuckens/�ֲ���ý College)

“I want a new drug,” Huey Lewis sang in the ’80s, “one that makes me feel like I feel when I’m with you.”

That drug might be oxytocin. Released by our brains when we get physically or emotionally close to someone, the hormone is associated with nurturing and intimacy — it’s even part of the feel-good feedback loop when dogs and humans gaze into each other’s eyes.

While the public has been told warm and fuzzy stories about the hormone’s effects, �ֲ���ý neuroscientist Nancy Koven will use a three-year, nearly $300,000 federal grant to take a cold and hard look at oxytocin.

“Oxytocin in the media is the love hormone, the cuddle hormone. I see my project as probing its potential dark side,” says Koven, an associate professor of psychology, chair of the Program in Neuroscience, and recipient of a $299,439 grant from the National Institute on Aging within the National Institutes of Health.

�ֲ���ý pilot study in 2013 yields “huge surprise.”

Koven got a glimpse of OT’s potential dark side in 2013 when she and a senior neuroscience major got a curious result from a pilot study: Otherwise healthy young subjects who had naturally high levels of oxytocin reported feeling anxious, socially disconnected, and aloof.

“It was a huge surprise,” she says.

At the time, Koven and her thesis student, Laura Max ’13, were looking to see if there was a relationship between low oxytocin levels and personality indicators of psychosis proneness.

“We didn’t find evidence of that,” Koven says, “but we did find a surprising opposite effect: Higher levels of OT can have negative emotional correlates.”

That wasn’t the only surprise. The subjects who reported those aloof feelings had also scored well on tests of emotional intelligence, including the ability to read people’s facial expressions and predict their emotions.

“The students who were innately good at that and who also had high OT levels were choosing to remove themselves from social settings,” Koven says.

A representation of the oxytocin molecule, upper right, bound to the protein neurophysin, shown as ribbons, that carries it through the body.

Oxytocin is widely available, mostly as a spray, with one website suggesting that you spray it “on your shoulders like a perfume [and] let other people around you inhale it, thus making them more trusting of you.”

Another site says that “the potential benefits of this to your social and business life hardly need to be spelled out.” Koven spells it out. “I am very alarmed by that message. It’s being marketed as a thinly-disguised date-rape drug.”

“Maybe too much…is not a good thing.”

The haphazard use of oxytocin isn’t limited to the online marketplace. In at least one study, Koven says, oxytocin was administered to residents of a nursing home to boost their desire to socialize. “It had no effect at all — we’re not exactly sure why — but there seems to be a lack of understanding that maybe too much of this hormone is not a good thing.”

She adds, “If you keep giving this drug without measuring how much oxytocin is already in someone’s system, you don’t know what emotional and cognitive states you’re pushing people into.”

That will be a main goal of Koven’s study, which will involve 240 subjects from age 20 to 80, primarily Maine residents. She wants to learn more about patterns of psychosocial adjustment associated with our natural levels of OT. For example, she asks, “is someone with a high OT level becoming aloof because they don’t find socializing rewarding? Or because socializing is overwhelming, like hitting a raw nerve?”

Koven also wants to look at how OT plays out over adulthood. “While there is considerable literature describing age-related cognitive decline,” she says, “little is known about the effects of aging on the OT system.”

And, she wants to see if individual differences in cognitive and affective style��— which themselves might be governed by two additional neurotransmitters, serotonin and dopamine��— moderate the effects of OT on our sense of well-being.

It is easier to drool than to be poked.

The project’s final goal is less about OT itself than about how researchers do this type of work. Specifically, she wants to prove to the scientific community that a researcher can effectively use saliva, rather than blood, to test for trace amounts of a substance like OT.

Obtaining saliva “is much less invasive than blood. It’s easier to drool into a vial than to be poked with a needle,” she says. “If we want to increase OT research, saliva is the way to go. We need to raise the esteem of saliva.”

While blood is the “gold standard” when it comes to testing for substances flowing through our bodies, Koven hopes to show that a current biochemical technique, known as two-dimensional liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry, can be used effectively on saliva, too.

The saliva tests will be done through a partnership with the University of New England.

As she does with all her research, Koven will enlist senior neuroscience and psychology majors as her research partners. This year’s team members are Zachary Radford ’16 of Wolfeboro Falls, N.H.; Sophie Sohval ’16 of Ridgewood, N.J.; Adriane Spiro ’16 of Durham, N.C.; and Erica Veazey ’16 of Fairbanks, Alaska.

Each will have the opportunity to publish aspects of the work both in their senior theses and in scholarly journals.

“Almost all my publications are with students because �ֲ���ý students do the science with me. They are junior colleagues in a shared enterprise,” Koven says.

In 2013, for example, Max reported the surprise findings both in her honors thesis and, with Koven, in an article in the journal

“When students join me in the lab, it becomes their research, too,” she says.

“As a faculty member, nothing is more thrilling than to watch students leap from being consumers of knowledge to producers of knowledge.”

Praised by students for her creativity and clarity in conveying the complex technical and moral aspects of neuroscience, Assistant Professor of Psychology Nancy Koven is one of this year’s two recipients of the �ֲ���ý College award for superior teaching.

Koven, a clinical neuropsychologist who studies connections between brain regions and cognitive and emotional functions, shares the Ruth M. and Robert H. Kroepsch Award for Excellence in Teaching with Sonja Pieck, assistant professor of environmental studies.

Pieck is on sabbatical during the winter semester and spring Short Term in 2011. �ֲ���ý students and recent alumni nominate faculty for the Kroepsch award, and a committee of previous faculty Kroepsch recipients selects the honoree.

Koven researches the anatomical roots of such cognitive functions as working memory or self-evaluation, and affective functions like attention to one’s own emotions. Her particular focus is how these regions and processes are interrelated in people suffering from mental illness, such as bipolar disorder.

Koven, who joined the �ֲ���ý faculty in 2006, teaches courses in abnormal psychology, cognitive neuroscience and affective neuroscience, among others.

“In neuroscience we have great technology, and it takes about all of your attention span just to keep up with it,” she says. “But the field lags behind on the front of translating that into the real world and dealing with real people.

“A big challenge for me in teaching is to get students to realize that that gap exists, and to know that it’s a gap they need to bridge — and also to realize that sometimes knowing the answers is not always what it takes to make someone better. You need to take the facts and situate them in the individual’s context.”

As a teacher, “I encourage my students to take what they’ve just learned, repackage it and teach it to somebody else,” Koven says. “When I walk through Pettengill at the end of the day and hear students teaching each other — saying, ‘Wait, back up, you forgot something’ — that makes me smile. They’ll tell me, ‘I knew I really knew it when I had to teach it to somebody else.’ ”

Storytelling, too, is a favored technique for imparting dense and complex concepts. “The best teachers I ever had were great storytellers,” Koven says. “I learn best when I situate myself almost as a reader trying to learn a story. And then when I teach, even though it’s science, I try to teach it like a story.”

When Scott Sinisgalli of the class of 2010, now a health policy research assistant at Mathematica Policy Research in Cambridge, Mass., took Koven’s “Cognitive Neuroscience” course, Koven explained the effects of diseases like Huntington’s and Parkinson’s by framing certain brain regions as characters trying to get messages to other regions.

“At the end of the story, she showed why each symptom occurred in the context of the chain of messages,” Sinisgalli says. “Her approach focuses on the fundamentals of what’s happening at each step, and how they affect the end result.”

For her honors thesis, a rigorous yearlong research project, senior psychology major Rachel DiStefano of Randolph Center, Vt., is investigating underlying causes of a condition in which an individual can’t identify or describe emotions. Koven is her adviser in this research into the affliction, called alexithymia.

“Her passion for research has been contagious,” says DiStefano, “and has made me appreciate the importance of psychological research on a broader level.”

Typically for �ֲ���ý, the connections between Koven and her students endure past Commencement. Allison Earon pursued a master’s degree in public health after graduating, in 2009, and will graduate this spring from the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory.

“Nancy’s role as my adviser has never stopped,” she says. “Now I’m applying to medical school and she just recently updated yet another letter for my application. My ongoing communication and friendship with Nancy continues to make me feel connected to �ֲ���ý.”

Koven believes that her teaching simply mirrors what she sees around her at �ֲ���ý. “It helps to have excellent colleagues. Everyone’s priority here is just to be the best teacher they can.”