Laboratory Facilities

The first floor of Asbury Building on American University campus houses the animal research laboratories and a common vivarium. The Psychopharmacology Laboratory (one of the research laboratories in this complex) consists of an eight room suite (approximately 1700 square feet) devoted to aversion learning, conditioned place preference conditioning, schedule-induced polydipsia drug discrimination learning, schedule-controlled responding and drug self administration. The physical space consists of a central control room which houses multiple computers for running research and data analysis, three running rooms, a drug injection and a drug preparation room and a room devoted to fluorescent microsopy. Adjacent to the lab is an office for the students.

All of the animals for our research are maintained in an adjacent animal holding area. This common vivarium has a total of seven animal rooms of which the lab has four. Each of these rooms can house three stainless-steel holding racks which in turn can each accommodate 36 hanging cages or 25 breeder bins. Adjacent to these housing rooms is a washing area for bottle and cage washing, holding room for the storage of food, bedding and cages and a common room in which drug manipulations can be made. This area also contains a common surgery and histology suite.

Animal care is provided by individual graduate students involved in specific research projects. The individual laboratories as well as the common vivarium are inspected monthly by Dr. Bernard Flynn (Veterinarian) and the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee.

Computing Facilities

The university provides all registered students with computing accounts and privileges at no additional charge. The Office of Information Technology (OIT) provides some computing services 24 hours per day, seven days per week, except for weekly scheduled maintenance every Monday during early morning hours. The computing center operates multiple laboratories that are open to the university community; another ten computing labs are located in the schools, colleges, and academic departments and are available to students registered in those academic units or programs. Both PC and Macintosh computers are supported, and some Unix accounts are available through the Department of Computer Science . Nearly two hundred software applications are available through OIT, including statistical analysis programs. In addition, many web applications and services are available as well as the online catalog of the Washington Research Library Consortium, of which American University is a member. Technical support can be found on the OIT Web site.