From breakdown to breakthrough: mentoring the next generation of neuroscientists

Professor of Biology Melissa Cordes can point to a formative moment that changed the course of her career.

It was in the middle of a breakdown her first year of college, after her dad was diagnosed with cancer and she ended a long-term relationship. She was struggling and ready to drop out, when the dean of students stepped in. On a practical level, he encouraged her to enroll in a few early biology courses—amidst a schedule packed with gen eds—to remind her why she wanted to be in college in the first place. And he enlisted an army of under-the-radar mutual contacts to ensure she never ate alone on campus.

“That dean saved me. That personal relationship is why I was successful,” says Cordes. “I fell in love with the idea of being that person to someone else: to know my students well enough to discern when they’re fine and when they need a little extra help.” 

Months later, Cordes was still in college and working part-time as a zookeeper, milking cows—the zoo was in Milwaukee, after all—when she began to realize the best parts of her job weren’t as much about the animals as they were about the people. She loved seeing their eyes light up in surprise or delight when they learned something new or witnessed an incredible animal moment. And she was fascinated by how animal interactions shed light on human ones. 

During her remaining college years and just after graduation, Cordes taught high school biology and Latin, worked in after-school programs, and even ran a coffee shop. All the while, she had her sights set on graduate school and eventually becoming a college professor. She found a graduate assistant position at the University of Wisconsin-Madison—a prestigious R1 research university—and completed a doctorate in zoology, focusing her studies on the neuroscience involved in social cues between starlings.

Research and relationships

When it was time to find a full-time faculty role, she was instantly drawn to Bethel.

“It’s small, but values research and was willing to provide the equipment I needed. That I could continue Madison-level research, and also be able to do a mix of neuro and bio, was crazy to me,” she says. The faith-centered, supportive community was another major selling point. Put simply, she never thought she’d find high-quality academics and sincere faith in one spot. “This is a place where I could give the same kind of student support that I received myself.”

Cordes taught neuroscience coursework at Bethel from the start, and was instrumental in the official launch of Bethel’s neuroscience major in 2019. She relishes teaching the upper-level courses, where classes are smaller and filled with one-on-one moments with students who are focusing their learning and weighing career options. While many neuroscience students plan on medical school and pursue Bethel’s pre-healthcare coursework, Cordes—with the help of the recently-launched Studio for Vocation and Calling—helps them consider other adjacent options that might be a great fit.

Clinical neuropsychology, clinical neuroforensic psychology, and occupational therapy are less obvious, but growing, career choices. Cordes admits that medical school brings a huge amount of pressure that isn’t the best route for every student. As a mom and hobbyist, who’s also a professor and researcher, the biggest question she likes to ask students isn’t necessarily just “what do you want to do?” but also “how do you want your life to be?” 

“I believe in setting students up for a happy career, not just a successful one,” Cordes says. “I love that Bethel gives a super strong foundation in those early courses, because I want students to be prepared for many different things—even if they don’t realize it—and feel freedom to explore academically. There’s such a breadth of what they can do.”

Whatever it takes

One way she helps students thrive and explore is to help them wrap their minds around complex topics, sometimes using unconventional methods. For example, Cordes’ neurobiology course covers the ascending and descending pathways in the spine. “If you stub your toe, how does that info get to your brain? How does your brain process pain versus touch or temperature?” she offers, by way of a practical explanation. 

There are a lot of neurons and neural pathways in the body, their interactions are complex, and they’re key to understanding neuroscience at a basic level. There just aren’t great visual resources out there to help students learn them, so she set out to make one.

Her first attempt at visualizing this complicated system was asking students to create a color-coded “subway map” that showed where different neurological signals go in the body, and where they cross paths. It didn’t cut it.

“Then I made this weird wind chime thing, with example sections of the spinal cord,” she says. “I used needles to ‘thread’ yarn through and show where signals went. I just kept trying to figure out how I could use something like that in class, because I was realizing how many gaps there were in the teaching resources out there for neuro. Even if you memorize the spinal cord pathways, like I had to in graduate school, it’s really difficult to imagine them in three dimensions and how they cross and travel in respect to other pathways.”

Soon she had developed a full-on board game, somewhat like the popular game Ticket to Ride, where players have to get from Point A to Point B by laying down train tracks. In Ticket to Ride, there are cities on each end of the routes, and there’s blocking strategy and a race against competing train lines. In Cordes’ game, there are neural pathways, “and the difference is that there is only one right way to get somewhere,” she explains. “I couldn’t just make everything into equal game pieces; all the routes would end up in the thalamus. Imagine if every route had to get to New York City. The board would be a mess!” 

Students pick a journey card with an event on it (i.e. “you stubbed your toe”) and a pathway they must race to follow, mimicking the actual movement of that information through the body. Thirty different pathways demonstrate touch, pain, and temperature sensations. 

Cordes has perfected the game over years, getting feedback from Bethel students who use it as a study tool. She shopped it around among peers in a neuroscience teaching group on Facebook, and their feedback was so positive she eventually developed the game for sale. Spinal Cord Chaos is intended for a mix of classroom and recreational audiences.

She also created Stop the Bleed!, which models how clotting factors work together. It was inspired by her son, who has the bleeding disorder hemophilia, and gives practical, empowering knowledge to families facing a similar diagnosis. Since entering the wide world of niche STEM-related board games, she’s become part of a network of neuroscience-professors-turned-game-creators who bounce ideas off one another and help bring each other’s ideas to market. 

Research and more

While board game development has become a practical and fun component of Cordes’ work as an educator, she also brings students into her comparatively serious research on the neuroscience behind animal behavior, specifically European starlings. The songbird is one of the only species to learn language from an adult tutor instead of being born with communication instincts, and have complex social behavior. It makes them a great model for understanding communication patterns in humans. Conveniently, starlings are also highly invasive, introduced to the United States in the 1800s and multiplying rapidly. Today the USDA captures nuisance starlings at the airport and donates them to Bethel, where they’re kept in an on-campus aviary for research. 

In 2023, Cordes and neuroscience major Emily Schmidt ’24 earned an Edgren Scholarship for their work looking into how starling gene expression could help better explain Autism Spectrum Disorders. Cordes and her students are still building that same data set, observing how birds’ interactions change in various seasons and settings, then analyzing brain tissue to try to understand why.

The Lucie Rom Johnson Neuroscience Center opened in 2022 and was custom-designed with ample space and equipment for faculty and students to explore questions like this. Every upperclass Bethel science student does original research—sometimes with funding from an Edgren, C. Weldon Jones, or Gregg Johnson scholarship—or an internship in the field. There’s a culture of exploration, led by faculty whose academic leadership is both deeply invested in the classroom and informed by top-level research.

Cordes’ decidedly hands-on approach to bringing neuroscience to life doesn’t stop at board games or birds, though. On any given day in her Introduction to Neuroscience or Neuroscience Methods courses, students might be playing R&B to see how dead roach limbs react to the beat, doing electrocardiograms (EKGs) on themselves, or dissecting sheep brains. 

In over a decade at Bethel, Cordes has become a beloved presence in the Department of Biological Sciences and as program director for neuroscience. But beyond imparting practical skills that help students thrive, she’s living out a full-circle moment.

She cares for students as whole people—and brings wonder, curiosity, and laughter into the learning experience. She’s the mentor for Bethel students that she desperately needed at their age. 

“I love helping students find their passion and potential,” says Cordes. “Neuroscience can be intimidating, and I never want a student to feel afraid to try.”

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