A fascination with disorders of the brain draws students to pursue Ph.D. training in neuroscience. However, although we have one of the most successful Ph.D. training programs in integrative neuroscience, our current curriculum divorces the basic neuroscience taught in the core curriculum from the clinical neuroscience incorporated in a handful of elective offerings. Furthermore, many of the elective offerings address clinical neuroscience in an abstract manner, with little or no first hand exposure to the disorders themselves in a clinical context. The goal of this application is to develop a course in which a clinical understanding of neurological and psychiatric disorders inform, enrich, and contextualize basic neuroscience education throughout the first year of the predoctoral training period. To achieve this goal, the following specific aims will be pursued: 1) Design, develop and introduce a first year core course in the Neurobiology of Disease to incorporate interactive disease-oriented problem-solving as an organizing and assessment principle in the classroom, introducing both clinical case presentations and clinical research literature in the context of the basic science topics that the students are learning concurrently in the basic neuroscience core course. 2) Use the repetition and recurrence of selected disease-oriented themes (e.g., Autism, Stroke, Epilepsy, Alzheimer's, Schizophrenia, Spinal Cord Injury, Addiction. Parkinson's) as a mechanism for cutting across and integrating the various levels of analysis: from genes to systems, channels to cognition, and circuits to emotions. 3) Develop joint presentations on selected topics by clinicians and basic scientists in order to integrate the basic science with the clinical etiological, diagnostic and therapeutic features, 4) Develop an archive of web-based interactive video-demonstrations of patient presentations and 5) Introduce discussions of clinical 'neuroethics' into the Skills and Ethics course. Outcomes will be evaluated by determining impact on student performance in comprehensive exams, undergraduate teaching, research seminars, individual predoctoral fellowship applications, publications, and dissertations. The application will utilize the translational programs and clinical faculty from the Georgetown Hospital, the VA Medical Center (Center For Schizophrenia and Neuroscience Research), National Rehabilitation Hospital, and Children's National Medical Center. We expect that by integrating clinical neuroscience into the first year predoctoral curriculum, our graduates will gain an appreciation for the clinical context for their research, ideas for novel research questions, and a facility for establishing clinical collaborations. ? ? ?
