Hughes Mentor:  Robert Johnston

Department: Psychology

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A Day in the Life of an Undergraduate in the Johnston Lab

What did it take to get into this lab? How did you find this opportunity?

I knew as soon as I was accepted to Cornell, that I wanted to participate in undergraduate research during my time here. Specifically, I was interested in the gray area shared by psychology and biology—neurobiology and behavior. Thus, I began to search for potential neurobio labs at the beginning of my sophomore year, but found few openings after e-mailing various professors. This is what led me to consider opportunities in the psychology department, and as it turns out, I found psych labs that happened to be very “biological” in nature. The Johnston Lab is one of them. I called Robert E. Johnston directly to express my interest in working for the spring and summer, and he agreed!


What organism or molecule do you work with? Is there anything special that you have to do to work with this?

I work with male golden hamsters, known scientifically as mesocricetus auratus. They are primarily used for olfaction studies since this is their most highly developed sense. The Johnston Lab experiments use behavioral and molecular techniques, including maze tests, immunohistochemistry, and statistical analysis. Often, the hamsters are aggressive and must be handled carefully with heavy gloves.


What is your day like in the lab?
What techniques are you using?

I work weekdays, usually 9:00 A.M. to 6:30 P.M, but have a fairly flexible schedule. Every day is different and what I do depends on the stage of the experiment I am on. This summer I had the opportunity to learn countless techniques essential for any animal lab, including carrying out hamster social interactions and fights, Y-maze tests for odor avoidance, perfusions (taking out the brain), brain sectioning, c-Fos staining, cresyl violet staining, slide mounting, cover slipping, and counting cells in active brain regions.


What have you learned about yourself and research from doing this project?

After learning so many laboratory techniques, I realized that I am a quick learner and am capable of adapting to new situations and demands. I also found that I really enjoy research, and intend to continue during the academic year with an independent project. In addition, before I came to this lab I assumed I was squeamish, so it was very surprising how quickly I overcame this fear when I learned to do perfusions. This was definitely unexpected.


What kind of students should be interested in your lab?

If you enjoy working with animals, but are not disturbed by looking at their brains, this is the lab for you. Also, anyone interested in neural processes, behavior, or a combination of the two would thrive in this lab. However, it is important to be patient since some aspects of the research take a long time and can often feel tedious.


Any advice for balancing research and academics?

To do research during the academic year, it is vital to have time management skills and to prevent your time in lab and your time in class from interfering with each other. To facilitate this, independent research can itself be taken for credit. If substituted for another class, this will lighted the work-load, making management much easier. Clearly, one cannot expect to be in lab during the year as much as he is during the summer, which is why the Hughes Program is such a wonderful option.

Dr. Robert Johnston

Bob Johnston grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia and started his undergraduate career at Dartmouth majoring in Chemistry. Like nearly all undergraduates, the focus of his interest wavered until he ultimately graduated with a degree in Psychology. While studying psychology, he realized that he was most fascinated in the physiological aspects of psychological mechanisms, especially those of social behavior. He decided to pursue these interests in graduate school and in 1970 received a PhD from Rockefeller University where he was educated in the areas of Neurochemistry, Physiology, Sensory Systems, and Animal Behavior. Immediately upon receiving his PhD, Dr. Johnston accepted a faculty position in the Cornell Psychology Department and has been succeeding in his field ever since.

Johnston was interested in science as early as the 5th Grade and his curiosity was fostered by good research experiences in high school. He is very pleased to be a scientist and finds great joy and excitement in generating unique ideas for experiments. He cheerfully reflects on the “thrilling moments” when an experiment yields a surprising discovery and sends his investigation off in a new and invigorating direction. He also takes pleasure in seeing such elation from the students that work in his lab. Undergraduates in the Johnston Lab get to interact on a more personal level than in the classroom.

There are a few different kinds of projects undergraduates can work on. Projects are usually of a behavioral nature, a mechanistic nature, or an overlap of the two. Ongoing investigations of rodent behavior include: the capacity for remembering individual odors, the sexual selection of marking behaviors, and the use of odor in social communication, individual recognition, and kin recognition. Neuro-mechanistic investigations involve staining for gene products of cells in the brain which have been activated due to some behavioral stimulus. Recently the Johnston lab has begun to investigate the effects of social stress on neurogenesis.

In the past, the Johnston lab has had undergraduates majoring in Biology or Psychology, as well as PreMeds and PreVets. Those students who might be interested in a career in research and are considering graduate school are highly encouraged to inquire about a position, but PreMeds/PreVets have never been turned away and have succeeded in the lab. As any mentor would, Dr. Johnston looks for students who are reliable, flexible, conscientious, serious, and enthusiastic.

Dr. Johnston finds mentoring students to be a very rewarding experience as I am sure any undergraduate researcher who had the pleasure of working with him would. There are several opportunities in this lab for students who are mechanistically or organismally inclined, or fall anywhere in between. The best way to inquire about a lab position is to email him at rej1@cornell.edu .