FACULTY FEATURE: Paul Lipton
Outside of Boston University, when the work hours come to a pause, Dr. Paul Lipton lives a life of adventure. He zooms past cars on his motorcycle, with his long time fantasy of becoming a race car driver in mind. He’s explored the beauty of the South Pacific Ocean when he scuba dived in Fiji and New Zealand. He’s climbed mountains and down glaciers in Alaska, and has set foot in European streets a dozen times.
But this life of adventure and excitement does not end when he bikes into campus every morning. Here, he is the director of the Undergraduate Program in Neuroscience, leading and guiding passionately curious minds. He is an associate director for the Boston University Kilachand Honors College and a faculty advisor for the Mind and Brain Society. Here, working alongside students and faculty, he instills an invaluable excitement for learning.
As a child, Dr. Lipton was constantly surrounded by conversations on human nature and the psychology of people, as his father was an English professor who taught about the psychology of adolescents through literature. This exposure developed a deep curiosity to understand how people work, but he found that just thinking about it from a psychological perspective was unsatisfying — he wanted to learn about the mechanisms behind the brain.
However, neuroscience was a fledgling field at the undergraduate level when he was in college, and Dr. Lipton graduated with a B.A. in Economics at SUNY Buffalo. Studying neuroscience did not cross his mind until his father connected him with one of his colleagues in the neurobiology department at Stony Brook University.
“In my senior year of college, I was trying to decide if I should apply to medical school or law school — those were the two options at the time,” Dr. Lipton said. “My father got my in contact with his colleague who happened to be a neurobiologist, and he told me about some really cool experiments that I had never even conceived of before.’”
After speaking with his father’s colleague, he also developed a newfound fascination for the field. Exploring the insights of the human mind through experimental methods mesmerized him, leading him to apply to the graduate program.
“It was not a very well informed decision,” Dr. Lipton said. “I knew very little about neuroscience, had never even taken a neuroscience class before, and had only taken one introductory psychology course. I applied blindly, and was accepted.”
From there, he studied the neurocircuitry that supports different types of learning and memory at a cognitive neurobiology laboratory at Stony Brook. When this lab transferred up to Boston, Dr. Lipton also moved to the city and stayed here till he got his PhD at Boston University in 2000.
Dr. Lipton returned to Boston University’s neuroscience department in 2003 as an academic director, and has been the director of the undergraduate program since 2013. As the director of the Undergraduate Program in Neuroscience, Dr. Lipton is responsible for overseeing the curriculum, managing course changes and new policies, and communicating with program faculty and the dean’s office. Outside of the neuroscience department, Dr. Lipton is one of two associate directors for the Boston University Kilachand Honors College, where he oversees and revises the curriculum and works with students on their senior keystone projects.
Every fall, Dr. Lipton teaches NE 101: Introduction to Neuroscience — the first core neuroscience course that majors take. This course on the biological basis of behavior and cognition covers topics from neuroanatomy and biology to the basics of neuropsychiatric disorders. Approximately 150 students fill the lecture room three times a week, and the room constantly brims with energy and engagement.
“Almost every week there’s something new in class, and the characters I see on a weekly basis make me laugh,” Dr. Lipton said. “Some of the individuals in that class make it a very fun place to be. They make it light, different — so the class never gets old.”
Outside of class, students come to Dr. Lipton’s office hours, where he answers any questions about material that students have and opens the space to discussions.
“I love the conversations I have with students,” Dr. Lipton said. “I love hearing hearing each and every individual student’s story — what makes their particular experiences both here and outside of the classroom and the university unique.”
Dr. Lipton also says that some notable experiences are when students put their ideas into action. These events include those hosted by BU Mind and Brain Society —such as BRAIN Day, an annual event that educates the Boston community on the wonders of the human mind, and Miracle Berries, an event that lets participants experience how taste perception changes by eating a berry — and independent programming.
“One year, a student wanted to put on a symposium about music and the brain, and he recruited four internationally recognized scholars on music and neuroscience, the Boston Symphony Brass Quartet to perform in the evening, and had about 300 people register for the event,” Dr. Lipton said. “To see one student’s dedication and then follow through for putting together a program like this was phenomenal.”
To Dr. Lipton, one of the reasons why the neuroscience program at BU is unique is because of the people: from the contagious enthusiasm of the students who tread Commonwealth Avenue to the dedication of the professors and faculty, who continuously put students and their learning first.
“The people make the place, they define the culture of the place, they are the heart of what makes up this place — and what I think is exciting about being here in Boston is the unbelievably rich community of neuroscience that’s going on between all the different universities,” Dr. Lipton said. “That exact excitement is what makes teaching never get old. Constantly seeing a new group of students express this amazement for the way the system works keeps me invigorated. It’s the enthusiasm of the students that’s really unlike anything I have ever seen.”
Written by: Emme Enojado
Editors: Yoana Grigorova, Stephanie Gonzalez, Enzo Plaitano
