IGERT Full Proposal: Computational Neurobiology Graduate Program

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9987614Terry Sejnowski - University of California, San DiegoIGERT: Graduate Training Program in Computational Neurobiology This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) award supports the establishment of a multidisciplinary graduate training program of education and research in computational neurobiology. The goal is to train a new generation of scientists and engineers with a broad range of scientific and technical skills who are equally at home measuring large-scale brain activity, analyzing the data with advanced computational techniques, and developing new models for brain development and function. This integrative training program is centered in the Department of Biology at UCSD and the Salk Institute, but includes faculty members from physics, chemistry, psychology, cognitive science, electrical engineering, computer science, and mathematics, as well as from biology and neuroscience. The training program will give all students hands-on experience in a wide range of advanced experimental and computational techniques through collaborative research between laboratories, industrial internships, and the opportunity to pursue research abroad. The faculty will participate in outreach programs to encourage and prepare underrepresented minorities for a career in computational neurobiology. Research areas in the training program include: (1) synaptic growth and plasticity; (2) neural dynamics; (3) neural population coding; (4) visual perception and memory; (5) stochastic learning algorithms; and (6) functional brain imaging.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; Engineering; and Education and Human Resources.