Two faculty members promoted

Julie Haas, Ph.D. Associate Professor

Haas promoted to associate professor with tenure

Julie Haas came to Lehigh after serving as a research associate at the Center for Brain Science at Harvard University. Dr. Haas earned her doctorate in Biomedical Engineering at Boston University and her undergraduate degree in music and mathematics at Indiana University.

Dr. Haas has taught a number of neuroscience courses at Lehigh, including “Synapses, Plasticity & Learning,” “Neurophysiology Laboratory,” and “Central Nervous Systems.”

Her service to the university includes being a member of the search committee for the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Health Professions Advisory Committee, and the Dean’s Council on Research, Scholarship, and Creative Work.

Dr. Haas’s research focuses on electrical synapses. The Haas Lab investigates how electrical synapses change in strength in response to activity in the neurons they couple, and they work to identify the molecular machinery involved in electrical synapse plasticity. In addition, they use computational models to explore how electrical synapses, and changes in their strength, contribute to information processing in neuronal circuits of the thalamus.

Dr. Haas’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and the Whitehall Foundation.

 

R. Michael Burger,  Ph.D. Professor

Burger promoted to full professor

R. Michael Burger came to Lehigh after serving as a senior postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington, and Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at the University of Munich. Dr. Burger earned his doctorate at the University of Texas at Austin and his undergraduate degree at Ithaca College.

Dr. Burger has taught a variety neuroscience courses, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. These include “Behavioral Neuroscience,” “Neuro. Of Sensory Systems,” “Experimental Neuroscience Lab,” “Advanced Neuro. Sensory Systems,” “Advanced Auditory Phsyiology,” and “CNS and Behavior.”

Active in varied aspects of service to the university, Dr. Burger is currently a member of the Faculty Compensation Committee, serving as its chair.

Dr. Burger is interested in how the brain processes information about its sensory environment. His research centers on the question of how cellular, synaptic, and systems level properties are integrated to allow sensory neurons to extract and represent features of the acoustic environment. The lab’s specific interest has been the contributions made by inhibition in neural circuits that compute the location of sound stimuli.

The research in the Burger Lab is been funded by the National Institutes for Health.