RESEARCH TRAINING IN VISUAL NEUROSCIENCE

Harvard Medical School, Boston MA

Investigators

Linked publications & trials

Abstract

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Twenty-one neuroscientists within Harvard's Neuroscience Program request continued funding for six pre-doctoral positions within our. Training focuses on the study of visual pathways from retina to brain, and cellular, molecular and developmental neurobiology of the visual system. The faculty are distributed throughout the university. Eleven faculty members are in basic science departments at the Medical School, six are in hospital based laboratories, and four are in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Over the past 15 years, Harvard University has greatly expanded the number faculty members who study the molecular, developmental, and neural-systems approaches to visual science. Students can choose laboratories among a large community of vision researchers, most of whom are affiliated with the NEI Core Grant in Vision research. The new goal of the Visual Neuroscience Training Program is to build a larger, coherent group of students who have a sense of community based in this Harvard-wide vision community, and who are trained by its faculty. The grant will support three students each in their second and third years, after they have chosen a dissertation lab, but advanced students remain actively involved with the program. This creates a large cohort of affiliated students. We train and supervise these students with courses, thesis committees, seminars, symposia, a Training Grant retreat, and our Systems-Vision journal club. Thus throughout their graduate careers, trainees interact with the faculty and with each other. Many vision scientists visit Harvard every year to give seminars; trainees at all levels interact with them over lunch and in lab visits. Through these activities, we will help train a new generation of vision scientists whose scientific careers will help us understand all aspects of the visual system: development, information processing, and disease.