Abstract
There is a significant shortage of neurologists in the United States, and this shortage is projected to worsen considerably. With the growth of undergraduate neuroscience majors, there may be opportunities to engage and motivate undergraduate students interested in the neurosciences toward clinical neurology. We surveyed undergraduate neuroscience faculty to better understand their curricular goals, existing interaction with neurologists, and their desire for additional connections with clinical neurologists and clinical neurology researchers. We invited 523 undergraduate neuroscience faculty (members of Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience) to complete an online survey assessing their research areas, courses taught, existing professional networks, and interest in developing connections in clinical neurology/neurology research. We had 140 of the 523 neuroscience faculty (26.8%) complete the survey. Of the 140 respondents, most respondents (93.6%, 131/140) stated their courses included a discussion about neurologic conditions, yet only 4% (6/139) stated addressing the shortage of neurologists in the country. Few reported they were able to partake in professional development opportunities for shadowing neurologists, neurosurgeons, or similar specialists prior to teaching neuroscience courses (19%, 26/140). Understanding neuroscience faculty's perspectives on how to bridge undergraduate neuroscience programs and the field of neurology is critical. This way, we can identify potential gaps and make recommendations for how to improve the neurology pipeline.
Glossary
- AAN=
- American Academy of Neurology;
- ANPA=
- American Neuropsychiatric Association;
- COVID-19=
- coronavirus disease 2019;
- FUN=
- Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience;
- IQR=
- interquartile range;
- PGY1=
- postgraduate year 1;
- REDCap=
- research electronic data capture
Footnotes
Go to Neurology.org/NE for full disclosures. Funding information and disclosures deemed relevant by the authors, if any, are provided at the end of the article.
- Received April 12, 2022.
- Accepted in final form July 25, 2022.
- © 2022 American Academy of Neurology
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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