Costa M. Colbert

Costa M. Colbert Associate professor, Department of Biology and Biochemistry As associate professor of biology and biochemistry at the University of Houston (UH), Costa Colbert has taught human physiology and neuroscience to many future health care professionals. Dr. Colbert’s medical school training helps him to tailor his courses to the needs of his students, but it was his passion for teaching and his ability to “transmit the excitement of scientific research from the laboratory into the classroom” that earned Dr. Colbert the UH College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (NSM) John Butler Teaching Excellence Award in 2005, and the University of Houston Teaching Excellence Award in 2006. Dr. Colbert’s long-term research goal is to understand how neurons and neural circuits underlie behavior. Much of his laboratory work, funded by the National Institutes of Health and the State of Texas, centers around understanding how individual neurons process information. He uses electrical and optical recording methods and computer simulations. Such work is necessary to understand how diseases such as Alzheimer's, autism, and schizophrenia, compromise brain function. Dr. Colbert is the faculty advisor to three successful student organizations, and a steering committee member of the Gulf Coast Consortium for Computational Neuroscience. He holds both an M.D. and a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, and an M.S.E. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from John Hopkins University.