This is a competing renewal of a five-year Institutional NRSA application for the support of predoctoral students in the interdepartmental Graduate Program in Neuroscience at Emory University. A fundamental strength of this program is the broad interdisciplinary training provided in a wide spectrum of neurobiological issues spanning several basic and clinical neuroscience-related disciplines. Because of the significant growth in highly qualified applicants to this program during the past funding period and the high success rate of current trainees in building up an outstanding record of peer-reviewed publications and successfully competing for external funds at the national level (among the top programs for NRSAs at the national level), we seek support for 10 students per year in this renewal (i.e. 3 more than the current funding state). A total of 94 PhD students (+ 14 new recruits for fall 2015) are enrolled in this program, which has consistently attracted a large and very high quality applicant pool from all over US and a significant number of international applicants with outstanding academic credentials. The program has been extremely successful in enrolling outstanding underrepresented minority (URM) students during the past 5 years, and in attracting a larger pool of high qualified URM to apply. Fifteen percent of the current pool of students in the program are from URM ethnic groups. An Executive Committee representing the 131 (96 on this grant) faculty from 23 departments and the Yerkes National Primate Research Center administers the program. This committee is headed by the Director, who oversees all aspects of program operation, two Directors of Graduate Studies, who monitor student progress, and the Director of Admissions, who is in charge of recruitment of new students in the program. Students in the program receive a broad curriculum of molecular, cellular and systems neuroscience courses in their first two years. A required hypothesis design and grant writing course helps students prepare their thesis proposal (with oral defense) in the form of an NRSA predoctoral fellowship application. They are also required to participate in 3 laboratory rotations before they pick their advisor (usually at the beginning of year 2). A wide variety of elective courses ranging from Basic Mechanisms of Neurological Diseases, Brain imaging and Computational Neuroscience are available to advanced trainees. Finally, students actively participate in various seminar series and receive significant training in teaching, neuroethics and scholar integrity.
This proposal is a competing renewal to support the training of ten pre-doctoral students enrolled in the PhD graduate neuroscience program at Emory University during years 1 or 2 of training. The interdisciplinary Emory neuroscience program comprises a total of 96 training faculty and 94 PhD students involved in neuroscience research that cuts across a wide array of disciplines that range from the understanding of basic neural communication to the treatment of complex neurological and psychiatric disorders. The pool of applicants (including underrepresented minority groups) has constantly raised during the past funding period, while remaining of outstanding quality. Therefore the present application requests the number of slots supported by this training grant to be raised from7 to 10 for the next funding period.
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