General Topic Areas for Senior Seminar

 

Population biology/genetics

Control of gene expression

Control of development (plant or animal)

Genetically modified food

Phylogeny, evolution, cladistics

endocrine mechanisms

immunology

marine biology

parasitology

conservation biology

coral reef biology

virology

neurobiology

osmoregulation and excretion

effect of greenhouse gasses on…

 

The list is long and incomplete, but does not include medicine, pharmacology, psychiatry/psychology, clinical research, etc. Once you choose a general topic, you will have to get more specific. All of these headings are far too general for specific and recent research.

 

Example: if you go to

www.scholar.google.com and type in neurobiology, you will find a review article on the neurobiology of learning and memory, which appeared in Science in 1986, the neurobiology of the Caenorhabditis elegans genome (a nematode) from 1998, the neurobiology of leeches from 1981, the neurobiology of the insect brain from 1996, the neurobiology of sleep from 2002.

 

These are just a few of the possibilities and I have made an effort not to list neuropsychiatric and neuromedical topics like alcoholism, autism, schizophrenia and the like.

 

Are you interested in the neurobiology of the insect brain? Now let’s see if there is any modern research on this topic that would make a cohesive research project. I Google the terms “neurobiology, insect” and come up with recent papers in insect vision, insect visual navigation, and insect taste. This tells me that by using these key words in the Web of Science or other database in the LIBRARY (Google is convenient for a quick search, but does not have the scope of the Library search engines), I should be able to find 10 recent articles (no older than 10 years) on one of these topics. Now all you have to do is find a recent newspaper article (no older than 2-3 years) on your topic and you have gotten started.

 

You can also do the search in reverse by using a newspaper article to track down a research topic. I do not care which way you do it as long as you get the required number of recent primary literature papers and a recent newspaper article.