| Message from the Dean
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 Dear members and friends of the School of Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) here at UT Dallas.
There is — as always — a lot going on. However, three developments stand out: (a) additions to our faculty, (b) the 10-year anniversary of our Center for Children and Families, and (c) the launching of the Center for Advanced Pain Studies.
New Faculty. There is nothing more central to the quality of a university unit than the faculty who support it, and (unlike your dean) do all of the most important work. This fall, we were able to recruit four extremely qualified individuals to serve as senior lecturers in BBS. You have probably heard complaints that, at many universities across the country, too many courses are taught by graduate students who have not yet earned their PhD, and often lack experience in the classroom. Of course, some graduate students do a great job teaching. For most of us, however, true excellence in teaching takes some years of dedicated effort and experience.
Senior lecturers are quite different from graduate students still working on PhDs. Our four new senior lecturers have PhDs in psychology, neuroscience or a related discipline, and all have published articles in high-quality journals. Perhaps more importantly, they have committed themselves to a career in university-level teaching, and have substantial classroom experience. Further, their teaching has earned extremely high rankings and stellar written evaluations from their former students. What does this mean? It means we are able to increase our offerings of first-rate courses taught by true experts in their fields who are gifted in the art of instruction. Look for their courses. Drs. Salena Brody and Gayle Schwark are offering courses in psychology, while Drs. Siham Raboune and Anna Taylor will be offering neuroscience courses.
I also want to highlight the arrival of Dr. Scott Griffiths, who will be assuming a senior position in our Doctor of Audiology program. Griffiths comes to us from the University of Florida, where he was director of its Doctor of Audiology program. He is a distinguished contributor to audiology theory and practice nationwide who will add significant strength to one of the nation’s best audiology programs.
Finally, I am pleased to introduce Dr. Catherine Thorn, a new tenure-stream assistant professor in neuroscience. Thorn who joined UTD in January, is an expert on the neuroscience of memory, learning and habit formation. She earned a bachelor’s in elcetrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a masters in electrical enginerring and PhD in electrical engineering form from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Thorn’s research brings engineering to bear on the coordination of multiple memory circuits in the brain that underlie learning and memory. This topic is central to our neuroscience programs, as Dr. Christa McIntyre, associate professor of psychology and director of the Neurobiology of Memory Lab, explains.
“Her expertise in electrophysiology, optogenetics and pharmacology approaches to understanding synaptic plasticity are well-aligned with the interests of systems neuroscience . . . while her investigations of the interactions of multiple memory systems relate to the interests of her colleagues who focus on cognitive neuroscience,” McIntyre said.
Among Thorn’s first contributions to our teaching mission is a new graduate-level seminar introducing students to emerging methods in neuroscience.
Center for Children and Families. CCF has become an integral part of BBS and significant segments of the Dallas community since its founding only 10 years ago. A simple listing of what CCF has accomplished during that interval cannot do justice to the center itself, nor to Dr. Margaret Owen. She directs the center, and a staff of four developmental specialists, along with trained program facilitators from the communities we serve, and UT Dallas students and affiliated faculty. But perhaps such a listing is not a bad start.
- CCF has conducted over 1,000 developmental screenings for high-need children under 5 years of age. Nearly 40 percent of those screenings have identified children with developmental delays or concerns. Many of these children have been referred for needed intervention services that they likely would not have received without the CCF screening program.
- CCF’s home-grown, research-based playful-learning program for children under 3 years of age and their parents has grown from one site in the Bachman Lake neighborhood to five locations today. A sixth site is being developed in South Dallas. To date, the program has served 450 impoverished children and parents annually.
- A program evaluation conducted in 2017-18 documented program-related increases in positive parenting practices and parent-child shared-play activities, growth in parenting efficacy, and a reduction in parenting stress.
- CCF has provided professional learning experiences for nearly 500 local practitioners and child advocates each year through its annual fall forum and spring lecture series.
- CCF has hosted six Screening Fairs in local high-need communities, screening children for developmental, vision, hearing, and language delays, in collaboration with the Callier Center for Communication Disorders.
- The center has thrown four annual “family celebration” events for parents and children of its playful-learning program, providing games, activities, puppet shows, food and fun for over 550 children and parents.
- Approximately 75 students work with the center each year, receiving meaningful service-learning experiences at the University and in numerous community-based program locations.
I close by noting that 23 faculty from BBS and the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences lend their expertise and guidance to the center’s operations. The center is housed in the Callier Center Richardson Addition, CRA 12.401.
Center for Advanced Pain Studies. Our newest BBS center is aggressively pursuing several lines of research aimed at alleviating suffering from pain and improving the lives of people with chronic pain and/or migraine. Drs. Ted Price and Greg Dussor were initially the primary drivers in the development of this innovative research institute, but they have already recruited seven UT Dallas faculty from neuroscience, biological sciences, bioengineering and mechanical engineering programs, as well as one more from the neuroscience program at UT Southwestern.
They have established a center website, centers.utdallas.edu/pain, and are hard at work adding innovative content. A key initiative is to create video, short- and long-form, with an emphasis on basic education on pain and neuronal plasticity in pain disorders.
The center is establishing a donor base and has received its first donations in the last year. In addition, researchers associated with the center have started working on several large grant initiatives, including a proposal to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and additional proposals to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Research articles linked to the center are beginning to appear. Indeed, one of these papers recently graced the cover of the Journal of Neuroscience: jneurosci.org/content/38/33.
This is clearly a Center to watch (or join!)
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