Students and faculty in the USC Neuroscience Graduate Program come from a variety of academic backgrounds to study questions spanning the entire spectrum of modern neuroscience research. Key questions include:
- how do molecules work together in time and space to build functioning nerve cells?
- how do individual neurons and their interconnections lead to the emergent properties of neural circuits?
- how do the information processing functions of neural circuits lead to complex behaviors, memories, emotions, and thought?
Departing from the traditional focus on individual disciplines, USC Neuroscience is characterized by collaborative interactions between faculty and students who have undergraduate or graduate degrees in biology, engineering, mathematics, computer science, psychology, neuroscience, molecular biology, behavior, cell biology, genetics and other disciplines. They work at many different levels of analysis, including research on cell-molecular neurobiology, systems-level analysis of normal and disrupted neural circuits due to disease, neural engineering, and cognitive and computational neuroscience.
When combined with a varied curriculum, weekly seminars, an annual graduate student symposium, and an extremely active neuroscience graduate student forum, the USC Neuroscience Graduate Program provides a highly supportive, research-intensive training experience designed to prepare students for a variety of successful careers.