Bill Griesar, PhD, is a Teaching Assistant Professor in Psychology and co-founder of the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience minor at PSU, founder and Neuroscience Coordinator of NW Noggin, Affiliate Graduate Faculty in Behavioral & Systems Neuroscience at OHSU, and the recipient of the 2024 Undergraduate Mentoring Excellence Award. This is the first year this award has been presented.
Bill loves teaching, learning, and listening to stories—from all ages, everywhere, all the time. Bill earned his BS in Neuroscience at Brown University, where he studied visual perception, and his doctorate in Behavioral Neuroscience at OHSU, where he explored the cognitive effects of nicotine in nonsmokers. Along the way he’s worked in a public library in New York, a grocery store in Maine, a bar in Rhode Island, a publishing company in Manhattan, a research lab at Rockefeller University, as an English teacher in rural Japan, as the author of a guide for North American undergraduates seeking study opportunities in Ireland and the U.K., as a study abroad advisor in Los Angeles and Portland, and as Coordinating Officer for the Waseda-Oregon Program, a consortium of universities in Oregon and Japan.
Bill developed and taught neuroscience courses at PSU, OHSU, PCC, Clark College, WSU Vancouver and Lower Columbia College since 2001, and cofounded (with his PSU colleague Jeff Leake) the art + neuroscience outreach nonprofit NW Noggin. Through NW Noggin (which is entirely volunteer), he’s met more than 70,000 K-12 students, houseless youth, members of Congress, incarcerated young people, museum goers, bike shop pub patrons and other community members over shared interests in perception, cognition, behavior, brain research and art. He’s been recognized as an innovator by the Obama White House, and has won five John Eliot Allen Teaching Awards at PSU. Bill and his husband are proud dads of two sons.
Sarah Taylor, the Operations Coordinator Center for PSU's Center for Internship, Mentoring, and Research (CIMR), said of Griesar, "He won my vote because of how clearly his passion about neuroscience shines through, and how active he is in the community to affect science-based change (e.g., testifying to U.S. Congress about higher education funding as well as the Oregon Senate about the importance of keeping standard time, working with high school kids in Vancouver, and leading the study abroad trip (Cerebrarte) to Chile)."