Achievement

This year we made our first IGERT fellowship award to a student in the Program in Neural Computation (PNC). The PNC is a recently-established PhD program in the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, designed for students who don't fit traditional disciplinary boundaries in neuroscience, computer science, or statistics. PNC students do research at the intersection of neuroscience and computation. At present the PNC program is offered only through Carnegie Mellon, but we are working on establishing the same program at the University of Pittsburgh.

Our first PNC/IGERT student, Ryan Poplin, develops Bayesian models of visual cortex and also conducts psychophysical experiments in monkeys. In his IGERT project he will use multi-electrode arrays to record from populations of neurons in area V2 in macaques.

Including PNC students in IGERT helps to integrate our graduate community and enrich the intellectual atmosphere of the program.