Neuroscience Training Program

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Project Summary/Abstract This renewal application requests support for integrated, broad-based, fundamental, multidisciplinary predoctoral training of first- and second-year students in Neuroscience at the University of Iowa. The application builds on more than three decades of success in matriculating, training, and placing top-caliber PhD students. Our Program features mature leadership (enhanced by the addition of an Associate Director), a sustained 10-year increase in the quality, depth, diversity, and geographic breadth of our applicant pool, and a sharp recent increase in funded neuroscience faculty. The Program draws on a long tradition of collaborations between basic and clinical scientists and a strong translational focus. Institutional support is exceptional. The Training Faculty are 52 experienced, well-funded neuroscientists with research interests that span the gamut of neuroscience, and 20 preceptors are clinician-scientists. Students participate in a carefully honed curriculum that offers broad and fundamental training in levels of analysis and diversity of approaches, with a special focus on the neuroscience of disease and disorders (including a very successful Neurobiology of Disease course). There is intensive training in experimental design, statistical methodology, and quantitative skills and literacy (enhanced by a new required course in Advanced Quantitative Training) and in professional skills development (enhanced by new curricular components in teaching, oral/written communication, networking/skill building, and grantsmanship), and detailed annual evaluation using the Individual Developmental Plan. The Program incorporates three laboratory rotations, regular programmatic activities (Seminar, Research Day, journal clubs), and comprehensive training in responsible conduct of research. The “value-added” is especially compelling—NIH training grant dollars enhance every aspect of our Program and have contributed directly to sustained successes marked by outstanding time to degree (20-year average of 5.2 years), productivity (5.1 publications per student, 2.9 as first author), completion rate (around 80%), placement of graduates in stellar neuroscience careers (over the past two decades, 51% of our graduates are in tenured or tenure-track academic positions), and diversity accomplishments (some 33% of our current student cohort is diverse; one-third [30/91] of our matriculated students over the past 10 years are diverse; these students have outstanding completion and placement outcomes). To maintain and extend these accomplishments, this renewal request asks for 8 slots per year to support first- and second-year students.