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I should have clarified further ... by and large, if you apply to a program in "Neuroscience," you are applying to a program in "Neurobiology." For example, MIT
by psyklic 18y ago
I should have clarified further ... by and large, if you apply to a program in "Neuroscience," you are applying to a program in "Neurobiology." For example, MIT has a huge Brain and Cognitive Sciences option, with a beautiful new building dedicated to Neuroscience. However, a few years ago I was told they only accepted one new student who applied only for computational work that year, since they have very few professors who would support computational work alone.
The fact is that there are very few professors working on "Computational Neuroscience," which is basically modeling experimental results. (I consider this data analysis because most of your time is spent analyzing experimental data. But, its intention is to not only explain given data but to predict the results of future experiments.)
Hence, if you apply to a neuroscience graduate program, there will usually only be one or two faculty members who do computational work. (There are some exceptions -- e.g. UCSD, Caltech.) Many programs won't even take you if you're only interested in computational work because if you somehow don't get along with the professor or it doesn't work out, you won't have a backup lab.
AI programs are divorced from experiments, but they get at the "bigger issues" and are satisfying for CS people -- whereas computational neuroscience models very complex small systems. Unfortunately, computational neuroscience also seems to be struggling -- many biologists discredit it, saying that its only real breakthrough has been Hodgkin and Huxley's model of the action potential!
- robg 18y agoI'm at MIT. I don't think that's true. In my lab alone (neuroimaging), there are two students focusing on computational issues. True it's of data, but that's the challenge to any scientist - explaining the data in front of you and coming up with ways to collect better data. Modeling is just one form of that. Computationalists, therefore, have much to add.
- yummyfajitas 18y agoYou might want to look slightly outside the Neuroscience department. Math and CS departments also do quite a bit of computational neuroscience. Here at NYU, we've got at least 5 computational neuroscience people within the courant institute (math+CS depts), and there are several more in the actual neuroscience department. Plus we have a computational biology Ph.D. program within cims. I know Rutgers has the BioMAPS computational biology program, and I think princeton has something similar.
- psyklic 18y agoI suppose that our main disagreements revolve about the ambiguous definition of "neuroscience," which is nowadays an all-encompassing term which has seemed to broaden to mean "absolutely any work which even mildly studies any aspect of the nervous system or behavior." In this respect, there are many opportunities for computation people. In neurobiology (the original "neuroscience"), the opportunities may be more limited. I was moreso discussing this latter definition in my posts, mainly because this is what many neurobiology-centric academic departments are called.