When she was as young as 7, Alina Schechtman-Taylor wanted to know how the brain worked.
“I remember telling my dad, ‘I don’t understand why people act this way. I need to figure it out,’” she recalled.
For her, studying neuroscience at Haverford College, was a logical choice.
“Why would you not want to study the thing that lets you study,” said Schechtman-Taylor, a senior from New York City. “The brain, that’s our entire world.”
Neuroscience has become the most popular major on the highly selective liberal arts campus on Philadelphia’s Main Line, counting nearby Bryn Mawr College students who also take classes at Haverford. And it’s only been around since 2021 when the two colleges — which have had a minor in the discipline since 2013 — decided to administer the joint major.
At Haverford, there were 24 majors the year it started; now there are 60. Bryn Mawr saw similar growth and currently has 49. Enrollment in Haverford’s neuroscience classes including both Bryn Mawr and Haverford students grew from 154 in 2014 to nearly 800 last fall.
“We knew that neuroscience was going to be popular, but we did not anticipate this growth,” said Helen White, Haverford’s provost, who noted the school recently hired another neuroscience professor to accommodate more students.
The major’s popularity is also growing at schools around the Philadelphia region — and across the country. Students and professors say neuroscience is popular because it’s interdisciplinary, involving psychology, biology, and chemistry, and can lead to a variety of careers. It can also be personal, because it involves studying diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, which have no cures, and the treatment of strokes and traumatic brain injuries.
“I would say about 90% of my students are coming into my lab because they have someone in their family with one of these diseases,” said Rob Fairman, a Haverford biology professor whose research focuses on neuroscience.
A growing major
In 2008, 110 colleges nationally offered neuroscience majors; now, it’s about 330, said Raddy Ramos, associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at the New York Institute of Technology. Ramos, who coauthored studies on the topic, said there were more than 2,000 neuroscience graduates in 2008; in 2019, that number had grown to more than 7,200.
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Pennsylvania is a hot spot, with 36 colleges having programs in 2022-23, Ramos said — more than than any other state.
Drexel University, which has had a minor since 2015, launched its undergraduate major in neuroscience in 2024.
“We have seen a 45% increase in applications over the last two years,” a university spokesperson said.
Pennsylvania State University in November announced it was launching two new undergraduate majors in neuroscience, one offered by the biology department and the other by the biobehavioral health department.
Neuroscience has become especially popular among pre-med majors, school officials say. Other potential career paths include biotechnology, pharmacology, psychology, and neuroengineering, while some students go on to law school, business, or public policy.
“There’s a lot more awareness that mental health conditions are due to changes in the brain, and people want to understand that,” said Lisa Briand, associate professor and program director for Temple University’s neuroscience program.
At Temple, neuroscience has become the fourth largest of 30 majors in liberal arts, Briand said. The psychology department a few years ago changed its name to psychology and neuroscience, she said.
At the University of Pennsylvania a decade ago, 100 to 120 neuroscience majors graduated annually, said Lori Flanagan-Cato, associate professor of psychology and codirector of the undergraduate neuroscience program.
“Twice in the past 3 years we have had over 150,” she said.
Swarthmore College, a highly selective small liberal arts college, graduated 10 to 12 neuroscience majors a year about a decade ago, said Frank Durgin, professor of psychology who oversees the program.
“This year, we anticipate graduating 24 majors,” he said. “Next year, it’s 30.”
The college has added two professors in the last two years to accommodate growth, he said.
Why students study neuroscience
In a lab at Haverford one afternoon last month, 16 students in white lab coats poked with paintbrush tips at thin slices of rat brain in preservative fluid, preparing to stain them to look for which neurons were activated. Some of the rats received the drug Ritalin, commonly used for attention deficit disorder, while others did not. Students were trying to discern differences in their brains when they performed certain tasks, said Laura Been, associate professor of psychology and director of the bi-college neuroscience program.
“We can … try to learn something more about how this sort of drug treatment impacts the brain,” said Been, whose area of interest is behavioral neuroendocrinology, which looks at the relationship between hormones, the brain, and behavior.
Students in Been’s class had varied reasons for studying neuroscience.
Sophia Lipari, 21, a junior from Jacksonville, Fla., whose father is a reproductive endocrinologist, is interested in hormones and the field of fertility.
Riley Fass, 20, a junior from Claremont, Calif., wants to be a special-education teacher. She already sees the connection between neuroscience and her job as a teacher’s assistant at a school where children have traumatic brain injuries and cerebral palsy.
“The topics we discuss — an injury here will result in this — I can actually see it in my students,” she said.
Deeya Abrol’s interest was stoked when she worked with a child on the autism spectrum as a swim instructor. Abrol, 22, a senior from Los Gatos, Calif., plans to go to medical school.
Schechtman-Taylor meanwhile wants to pursue biomedical engineering and specifically developing medicines for the treatment of neurodegenerative disorders.
“I want to work on the treatment side,” she said.
Fairman, the Haverford biology professor, said a recent graduate’s mother had died of Huntington’s disease, meaning she has a 50% chance of getting it, he said. She worked in his lab and wanted to be involved in his research on protein clumping in the brain and its effect on diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
Junior Liv Davis, 21, wanted to help find a cure for Parkinson’s, which struck her grandmother in 2020.
“She’s had two falls in the last year and a half because it’s progressed pretty quickly,” said Davis, of Lanoka Harbor, N.J. “It’s hard to see someone you love so much live with it, but it makes it all the more rewarding to work toward fixing it.”
Davis, who has worked in Fairman’s lab since her freshman year, tried to get into an introduction to neuroscience class early on. But there wasn’t room. She ended up majoring in biology, which she thinks probably would have happened anyway.
About half the students working in Fairman’s lab are neuroscience majors, he said.
Davis is currently studying the effect of a chemical on sleeping fruit flies that have been genetically modified to carry the protein associated with Parkinson’s.
Last summer, she received an inaugural research fellowship funded by Shamir Khan, a Haverford alumnus and psychologist who was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s.
Her grandmother was glad she could continue the research, said Davis, who plans to become a doctor.
“She always jokes with me,” Davis said. “‘Give me a spoonful of that chemical, whatever it is. If you need a test subject, you let me know.’”
