Assistant Professor of Psychology Nicole Weekes says her enthusiasm for everything from research to teaching stems directly from her conviction that neuropsychology is the most fascinating field in the world.

"How could someone not love neuroscience?" she demands with a characteristic smile. "It's the coolest part of psychology. It addresses how we think, how we behave and how we feel by understanding it in a scientific way through the brain."

Her enthusiasm for her cutting-edge field of study may have something to do with her recent selection as the 2001 California Professor of the Year by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE), the world's largest international association of educational institutions.

This is the second consecutive year that a Pomona College Professor has won the award. In 2000, Katherine Hagedorn, associate professor and director of ethnomusicology, was honored.

At Pomona, Weekes is known both for her serious scholarship and for the deep interest she takes in her students. In the words of Linda Whealton '01, "On the first day of class, her personality was so exuberant that I could not help but become as excited about the rest of the semester as she obviously was."

In the classroom, her approach is to "walk the line between what you would expect the professor to do in class and being far more experimental and informal. I try not to just get up in front of class and give them a lecture but to find ways to bring things to life for them." She may use her unique ability to model the behavior of a patient with a specific kind of brain damage to put her students in touch with the complexities of brain function. Or she may pretend to an extreme belief in order to draw her students out.

"During one heated discussion in the Biological Basis of Psychopathology, for instance, I commented that I thought personality was genetically based," she explains. "Some of the students went wild. How could I argue that? Hadn't I read this or that? Suddenly they are deeply engaged, and by the end of class, they had moved the argument to a place of greater balance."

As a role model, Weekes is known for sharing her experiences, bringing students into her lab, mentoring them in their research and careers and being extremely accessible.

Currently on a one-year Steele Leave to continue her research, she is working at McGill University's Douglas Hospital in Montreal, Canada, where she is studying stress, memory and brain damage. Among the issues of the study are: Do individuals who are under higher levels of stress or who have higher levels of stress hormones have greater damage/atrophy to particular regions of the brain?

"Previous work by the same lab suggests that the answer is yes," she explains. "We are interested in two brain regions in particular, the hippocampus and the frontal lobes, both known to be involved in memory functioning."

Weekes earned her B.A. degree in psychology from Boston University and both her M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology with an emphasis in behavioral neuroscience, from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her articles, a number of which have been co-authored with students, have appeared in the scholarly journals Brain, Brain and Cognition, Brain and Language and Neuropsychologia.

--Cynthia Peters