IGERT: Brain, Mind, and Society: An Integrative Training Program in Valuation, Decision-making, and Social Exchange

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This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) award supports the development of a multidisciplinary graduate training program in Brain, Mind, and Society. Its purpose is to provide students with the analytical foundations and the experimental skills needed to pursue scientific careers at the intersection of neuroscience and the social sciences, who are capable of integrating neural, psychological, and economic approaches to attack basic and applied problems related to valuation, human decision making, and social exchange. Trainees will take a rigorously designed, largely team-taught course sequence, spanning from nervous system organization and function to mathematical models of decision making and social exchange. This coursework will be complemented by equal balance in cross-disciplinary laboratory research, thereby tightly integrating research training with scholarship to create true intellectual hybrids across both disciplines. The Brain, Mind, and Society program emphasizes the inclusion of highly qualified underrepresented students through a four-tiered outreach program, Science Matters, involving a team-based mentorship program bringing together students from the this program, underrepresented undergraduate students at Cal State University, Los Angeles and underrepresented high school students in Los Angeles' Belmont Schools. The resulting diversity of the program's collaborative teams will reflect the program's broader impact in five key social application areas, which may ultimately provide a new scientifically-enriched discourse to help us understand critical social problems, in economic, therapeutic, educational, philosophical, and business and political applications. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, 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 innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.