Neuroscience Graduate Students Celebrate John Huguenard's Leadership

By Tanya Raschke

The Neuroscience PhD students celebrated the leadership of John Huguenard on Friday, January 31 at a reception where he passed the torch to a new Director of the Graduate Program, Anthony Ricci.  Students past and present gathered to thank John for his service and leadership.  Professor Huguenard directed the Neuroscience IDP program for 8 years, seeing it through not one, but two NIH training grant renewals.  

While at the helm, Huguenard introduced the Stanford Intensive Neuroscience (SIN) Boot Camp for incoming students.  SIN is a two week course offered just before the start of the autumn quarter.  It is an intensive experience that focuses on cellular and molecular aspects of neuroscience research presented through lectures and hands-on labs.  Another successful program begun by Huguenard is Neuroscience Superfriends, a forum for senior grauduate students to present their PhD thesis work to the Neuroscience community.  Superfriends was designed as a forum for keeping senior students who are finishing up their thesis work in regular contact with the junior students.

At the celebration, students and faculty took the stage to share stories of their experiences working with Huguenard, describe the impact he made as a mentor, and share some laughs.  Jaime Adelson spoke about his mentorship of individual students.  "John gave me a piece of advice that has stuck with me over the past few years, which was that becoming a truly great scientist isn't just about being "smart", but about being willing to try challenging and difficult things," Adelson recalled.

Professor Miriam Goodman thanked Hugenard for his service, "John is genorous and knows the importance of community in research.  Over the past years, he has put this knowledge into action and we are grateful for the many ways he has worked to build community in the Neuroscience Graduate Program."

Huguenard was presented a plaque containing a photo of the current Neuroscience students framed with notes of thanks from the students.