IGERT: Interacting with the Brain: Mechanisms, Optimization, and Innovation

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This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) award supports the development of a multi-disciplinary, integrative graduate education and training program in NeuroEngineering (NE) at the University of Minnesota at Twin Cities. Intellectual Merit: The purpose of this program is to train doctoral students to develop the skills to revolutionize technologies for interfacing with the brain and advance the fundamental understanding of neuroscience processes that arise when interfacing with and modulating the brain. Broader impacts include the development of a multi-disciplinary training program that blurs the boundary between neuroscientists and engineers, thus enabling a new generation of scientists to competently and confidently take on the grand challenges in the interdisciplinary field of NeuroEngineering. The NE program includes major research themes in decoding brain signals, modulating brain dynamics, and bi-directional brain interfacing. The program is a "degree-plus" model in which pre-doctoral students are admitted to one of the participating graduate programs (Biomedical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Neuroscience), and are trained through a series of hands-on, modular neuroengineering courses. All NE Fellows will immerse themselves in a lab outside their major in the summer of their first year, engage in multiple lab rotations, and participate in at least one clinical lab rotation, summer internship at a neurotechnology company, or summer international research experience. NE Fellows will have co-advisors beginning in their first year, one from the engineering sciences and one from the basic or clinical neurosciences. The training program incorporates several outreach efforts to recruit women and underrepresented minorities, provide outreach to K-12 and industry, and train NE Fellows to be effective communicators. 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.