A major strength of the NACS program is the broad, integrative training it offers graduate students. An important goal of the curriculum is to assure that all NACS students have a core body of knowledge covering the basic concepts across the full range of the neural and cognitive sciences. This must be balanced with a second goal: a doctorate in NACS is a research degree, and the best way to learn the skills and strategies of research is to be immersed in day-to-day laboratory or research group activities and an independent project. Thus, the program should impose the smallest number of required courses consistent with the sufficient breadth of training.
Training Grants
Comparative and Evolutionary Biology of Hearing
The Center for Comparative and Evolutionary Biology of Hearing (C-CEBH) at the University of Maryland, is a campus-wide program that is devoted to studies of auditory neuroscience in the broadest sense. C-CEBH is currently made up of 11 UM faculty from five departments (Biology, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Hearing and Speech Sciences, Linguistics, and Psychology). In addition, we have a close collaboration with the intramural research program at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, and 12 of those investigators are adjunct faculty in the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) graduate program at UM and so are available to serve as co-mentors for doctoral and postdoctoral research with UM faculty. The laboratories in C-CEBH cover a broad range of research interests, approaches from molecular biology to human psychoacoustics, and species from insects to mammals. The breadth of research areas of the core and collaborating investigators, combined with the wide range of animal species and a common interest in comparative evolutionary issues, provides us with an opportunity to provide research and training opportunities that exists nowhere else. Moreover, our collaboration with the intramural program at NIDCD extends opportunities for research collaboration to the genetic and molecular levels.
Neuroethology
The University of Maryland offers a Training Program in Neuroethology, which is directed by Professors Cynthia Moss and Catherine Carr and includes faculty from Psychology, Biology, Engineering and Animal and Avian Sciences. Neuroethology involves a multidisciplinary approach that combines analysis at the behavioral, systems and cellular level. It starts with the premise that the brain of an animal is designed to process biologically relevant stimuli and control behavior that is important for survival and reproduction. This powerful idea underlies all neuroethological studies and shapes the choice of animals and behavior, methods of study and interpretation of results. Because the field concentrates upon species-specific behavior, neuroethological studies can inform studies of brain evolution. In parallel, the comparative neurobiological approach can reveal remarkable similarities of organization among vertebrate or invertebrate brains; these may result either from design constraints or from homology. Detailed knowledge of the brains of different species, and their degree of relatedness, is essential if we are to understand the evolution of the nervous system. Similarly, differences between neural systems are equally as instructive, in that they may reflect the action of evolution upon different substrates, and the different requirements of each system. Modern comparative neurobiology must be accompanied by studies of evolution and embryology so that our trainees acquire a good understanding of how brains are transformed among vertebrate classes. Please visit our web site
