The goal of this training program is to provide advanced graduate students and postdoctoral fellows with interdisciplinary training in cognitive neuroscience, leading to careers devoted to the study of normal and abnormal brain function as it pertains to mental health. San Diego has an extremely active research community in cognitive neuroscience, and 26 faculty members from the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and at UCSD participate in this training program, including 7 new faculty since the last renewal of this program. The graduate students will be enrolled in graduate programs in the Departments of Cognitive Science, Psychology, the Neurosciences Graduate Program and the Division of Biological Sciences. The predoctoral trainees will be engaged in thesis research, and the postdoctoral trainees will be engaged in new research projects aimed at developing new approaches to understanding cognitive brain functions. The administrative structure of the proposed program comprises an Executive Committee with co-Directors T. Sejnowski (Salk and UCSD) and E. Halgren (UCSD), and members T. Albright (Salk)., J. Elman (UCSD), N. Swerdlow (UCSD), M. Kutas (UCSD), and L. Squire (UCSD). The five major areas of research of the faculty are sensory processing and perception, selective attention, learning and memory, cognitive control and translational-mental health. The laboratories that will participate in the proposed training program have a long history of research collaborations. Training will be provided in a wide range of techniques including electrophysiology, magnetoencephalography, functional magnetic resonance imaging and computational modeling. In addition to these methodologies, we have added genomics and included new participating faculty in this area. The training program offers courses in all these areas, which will be augmented by a new course required for all trainees focusing on the neural bases and phenomenology of psychiatric illnesses. Major research facilities include the Functional MRI Center, the Multimodal Imaging Laboratory, the Radiology Imaging Laboratory, the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, and the Motion Capture/Mobile EEG Laboratory. The current training program, now in its 15th year, supports 4 predoctoral and 4 postdoctoral trainees. The Office of Graduate Studies at UCSD has pledged a matching fellowship for a minority predoctoral student.
The goal of this training program is to provide advanced graduate students and postdoctoral fellows with interdisciplinary training in cognitive neuroscience and to create a new generation of cognitive neuroscientist devoted to the study of normal and abnormal brain function. Training will emphasize advanced methods for analyzing the neural bases of cognitive processes including perception, selection attention, learning and memory, and cognitive control, which are essential for adaptive everyday functioning. The program also includes training in translational research on impaired cognitive functions that will lead to improvements in diagnosing and treating mental disorders.
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