Brooke Poerstel (Research Associate, UNCW Graduate Alumni)

    Brooke graduated from the Psychology Masters program in 2007. Her thesis work focused on olfactory conditional discrimination learning in rats, specifically looking at equivalence relations. She is now employed as the laboratory research associate and part-time faculty member for Introductory Psychology. In the lab she oversees projects, assists students with lab work, and continues to run both animal behavior and psychopharmacology experiments. Current projects include examining the effects of various psychoactive substances on olfactory memory span in rats, investigating transitive inference in the automated olfactometer apparatus, list learning abilities, as well as a field study looking at different variables affecting alarm calling in passerine birds. Her interests span from animal behavior and learning to psychopharmacology, behavior analysis, ornithology, and conservation and evolutionary biology. Eventually, Brooke would like to earn her PhD and work in a research and teaching setting in either animal behavior or psychopharmacology, but can't seem to choose between the two at the moment.