This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) project will develop new directions for an existing cross-disciplinary training program offered by the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition (CNBC) at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Eleven doctoral programs are formally affiliated with the program, which trains young scientists in interdisciplinary approaches to understanding how cognitive processes arise from neural mechanisms. One half of the new initiative concerns new technologies for experimental neuroscience, e.g., optical, magnetic resonance, and magnetoencephalographic approaches to functional brain imaging, and analysis of neuronal population activity patterns using advanced statistical and data visualization algorithms. The complementary half concerns the applications of systems and cognitive neuroscience to technology development, in areas such as neural prostheses, neural control, and cognitive robotics. The most successful aspects of the current CNBC IGERT program will be retained: a common core curriculum, use of multiple advisors from different disciplines, and a competitive proposal process for selecting students for funding. The project will train a new breed of scientists to achieve the fullest possible integration of new technologies into cognitive and systems neuroscience research. It will also complement a new initiative at Carnegie Mellon, in collaboration with Spelman College, to establish undergraduate courses in cognitive robotics at several historically black colleges and universities, thereby increasing the pool of minority applicants to graduate programs such as the CNBC program. 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.
This IGERT project provided unique, customized training opportunities for doctoral students at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh who were interested in studying the neural basis of cognition. In most cases, IGERT fellowships were awarded via a competitive proposal process in which each student proposed a project outside the scope of their regular research that would require training in a new discipline or technique. A total of 50 students were supported over the seven year life of the project. Their research projects involved a wide range of technologies. Some examples: (1) a biology student whose research focus was intrinsic signal optical imaging of visual cortex was funded to receive training in sophisticated image processing techniques for analyzing the imaging data; (2) a robotics student whose research area was computational modeling of the rodent hippocampus received training in neurophysiological recording from the hippocampus of behaving animals; (3) a psychology student investigating neural underpinnings of violent behavior in young males received training in both genetic analysis and functional brain imaging; and (4) an electrical engineering student who works on motor control algorithms driven by brain-computer interfaces received cross-training in neurophysiology to perform BCI experiments with rhesus monkeys. The project also included an international training component that provided opportunities for students to work in foreign labs. For example, two biological sciences students independently visited a lab in Gottingen, Germany, where they received training on new techniques for optical imaging of cortex. A psychology student who studies bilingualism spent time in a lab in Spain where she had access to one of the most extensively studied bilingual populations in the world: speakers of Spanish and Catalan. And a robotics student spent a semester at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom, where he worked with a leading expert in machine learning and developed a new unsupervised machine learning algorithm. The IGERT program was part of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition's graduate training program, which is formally affliated with 13 doctoral programs at the two universities. Students who complete the program's requirements earn a certificate from the CNBC along with a doctoral degree from their home department. During the course of the IGERT project, the CNBC started its own doctoral program, the Program in Neural Computation, for students who want to specialize in computational neuroscience. Two of the funded IGERT students were PNC students. At the time the project ended, 29 IGERT students had completed their doctoral degrees and 16 were continuing to work on their doctorates. Of the 29 graduates, 10 were doing postdoctoral work, 3 were doing medical residencies, 6 had become assistant professors, 3 held academic research positions, 4 were technologists in the computing industry, and the rest were in other areas.
