Nicholas Grebe

Nicholas comes to Occidental from the University of Michigan, where he was a postdoctoral fellow. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of New Mexico and a bachelor’s degree in psychology and neuroscience from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

What drew you to teach at Occidental?

My academic background prior to Oxy consisted entirely of studying and working at large research universities. I'm grateful for the training I received, and I'm proud of the skills I gained in designing research projects and publishing papers at these institutions. But, in the last years of my postdoc especially, I began to worry that a single-minded focus on the next paper or grant would slow my growth as a teacher-scholar--which, to me, is what a professor should be. I wanted to work somewhere where I could foster both sides of that teacher-scholar role, and I thought Oxy was a perfect fit for someone with my priorities.

With a full semester behind you, what are your impressions of Oxy students?

Students at Oxy are bright, creative, and conscientious. I'm continually impressed by the quality of questions I get in class. Students bring in perspectives that come not just from other psychology classes they're taking, but from their education across the sciences and humanities. I also love that there's a norm for students to get involved in research early--I've even had students approach me with fully-formed study proposals, which isn't something I really encountered before coming here.

When did you first become interested in evolutionary biology?

I remember it well. I went to high school in a politically conservative town with a very strong Evangelical Christian influence. My high school biology teacher, Mr. Hays, was under significant pressure to equivocate and provide 'equal time' to teaching evolution and Intelligent Design. It quickly became clear that Mr. Hays was not going to do that. So, evolutionary biology was already something of a subversive topic, which I'm sure piqued my interest. But more importantly, Mr. Hays taught me how an idea, like evolution by natural selection, could be beautiful: it organized the natural world in a logical way, it explained where we came from and the amazing diversity of creatures on our planet, and despite 150 years of exploration, the full implications of this theory were yet to be explored. In particular, the observation that evolutionary forces have acted upon the brain, just as they had the rest of the organism, was one of the tenets of the new discipline Evolutionary Psychology. This blew my mind, and I wanted to learn everything I possibly could about the field. That was twenty years ago now. I'll never learn everything there is to know about evolution, but I'm just as hooked as I was in high school.

Do you have a favorite class that you are teaching, and why?

I teach a lab component that accompanies my Physiological Psychology class. I love providing psychology students--most of whom have spent zero time in a wet lab--hands-on experience with things like brain dissection, biological sample collection, and hormone measurement. Students can get 'under the skin' to see and measure the biological systems that give rise to the behaviors that made them want to become psychology majors. The techniques and skills students gain from this lab are applicable to all sorts of future careers, and their growth across the semester is so satisfying for me to witness; I think they feel similarly. I imagine few of them ever pictured being able to do what we do by the end of the semester.

Anything else you would like to add?

Another component to my research is field work in the home countries of non-human primates. For example, I'm involved in research with wild mountain gorillas at the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund in Rwanda, where we study how hormone fluctuations track transitions in gorilla societies. I'm really excited to bring this field work component to Oxy, and to bring students with me to Rwanda or other primates range countries in future summers.