This is an application for predoctoral training support for the Program in Neuroscience at the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB). This Program, chartered by the State of Maryland to offer the Ph.D. in Neuroscience, offers broad-based multidisciplinary training through study tracks in four areas of neuroscience: Behavioral/Systems, Cellular/Molecular, Developmental and Cognitive/Computational. These areas reflect the research strengths of the faculty and the educational and training opportunities of the Program are focused on them. The Training Program is founded on the well-established administrative structure provided by the Program in Neuroscience and is run by an interdepartmental faculty group with individual subcommittees dedicated to advising students and monitoring their progress throughout their graduate education. General and specific course requirements, including a wide range of didactic course electives and laboratory rotations, establish an orderly, but flexible, educational framework. Journal clubs and seminars provide formal and informal educational experiences. The faculty, members of which come from the Medical, Dental and Pharmacy Schools, and the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, is an outstanding group of 49 individuals selected for their widely recognized expertise in neuroscience research, extensive records of success in graduate training, state-of-the-art research facilities and exceptional abilities to secure national grant funding. Faculty members have numerous collaborative, teaching, and supervisory interactions, which provides cohesiveness to the program and copious opportunities for students to obtain experience in interdisciplinary neuroscience studies. The Program in Neuroscience, although established relatively recently, builds on a long and successful history of graduate training in neuroscience at LIMB. The Program, however, provides a coherence and an accessibility to interdisciplinary interactions often difficult to obtain under traditional departmental, school-based, units. The six predoctoral stipends requested each year in this application would be used to support outstanding students for the first two years of their studies prior to their embarking full-time on laboratory research in one of the interdisciplinary research tracks in the program.
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