Project Profile
Innovative Cross-Disciplinary Training in Neuroscience and Computation
Carnegie Mellon University
Abstract
This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award supports the establishment of a new multidisciplinary, multi-institution, graduate training program of education and research within the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. The CNBC offers interdisciplinary training to students… more »
This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award supports the establishment of a new multidisciplinary, multi-institution, graduate training program of education and research within the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. The CNBC offers interdisciplinary training to students in a variety of fields who seek to understand how cognitive processes arise from neural mechanisms. Participating departments at Carnegie Mellon are Computer Science, Psychology, Robotics, and Statistics. At the University of Pittsburgh they are Mathematics, Neurobiology, Neuroscience, and Psychology.
The IGERT training program is a new kind of cross-over training experience in which students develop professional competence in an area outside their home discipline. For example, a computer science student whose research involves computer modeling of the hippocampus could work in a neurophysiology lab, learning to do parallel multiunit recording from the hippocampus of behaving rats. A psychology student doing functional brain imaging could receive cross-over training in statistical analysis techniques for functional imaging data. During their first year in the IGERT program, students will acquire necessary background knowledge through a combination of coursework, directed reading, and observation in the lab. In the second year students will work half-time in their host lab to complete a small research project of their own.
IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the multidisciplinary backgrounds and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing new, innovative models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries. In the third year of the program, awards are being made to nineteen institutions for programs that collectively span all areas of science and engineering supported by NSF. The intellectual foci of this specific award reside in the Directorates for Biological Sciences; Computer and Information Science and Engineering; Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences; Mathematical and Physical Sciences; and Education and Human Resources. « less
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