"Yale is truly a safe haven for the intellect. Communities are built up around scientific goals, such as neurodegeneration, and incorporated into the BBS, which is a juggernaut of research power, coursing quickly past the horizon of human knowledge. I have found my experience here to be energizing and culturally revitalizing. New Haven has art, music, and access to sports and nature not found many places in the world. The programs in the BBS host many activities to counter boredom, and jokes between friends smacking of intelligent conversation make the lab an ideal place to work."
Mike Henderson
Neuroscience Track
The scientific interests of the Neuroscience Track faculty at Yale represent the full range of the broad and rapidly growing field of neuroscience. Leaders in areas ranging from the genetic and structural analysis of single-membrane channels to the functional characterization of the neocortex are represented in a diverse group of outstanding scientists. In many research areas groups of faculty with different backgrounds apply complementary technologies to similar problems. The long and productive history of multidisciplinary collaboration between basic and applied sciences has also made Yale a leader in clinically relevant neuroscience. The neuroscience faculty members command more than half the university’s biomedical research budget and occupy more than 60,000 square feet of well-equipped laboratory space.
The Faculty
The interdisciplinary research programs of Yale neuroscience faculty are central to the Neuroscience Track in the Biological and Biomedical Sciences program. The primary purpose of the Neuroscience Track is to provide students with maximum diversity and depth in the most important areas of neuroscience research. The Track draws on the knowledge and expertise of more than eighty faculty members, representing over twenty departments in both the Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the School of Medicine, ranging from Psychiatry to Pharmacology and from Cell Biology to Biomedical Engineering.
The Ph.D. Degree
The Neuroscience Track seeks to produce neuroscientists with both specialized knowledge and a broad-based understanding of the discipline. Yale offers students the choice of two broadly based graduate programs in the neurosciences, one of which students elect to follow in their second year. A Ph.D. degree in neuroscience is offered by the university-wide Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program (INP), a unified graduate program founded in 1986 and jointly administered by all the participating departments of the Neuroscience Track. Alternatively, students may obtain a Ph.D. in Neurobiology, offered by the Neurobiology Graduate Program, a smaller program focused on studies of the cortex and centered in the Department of Neurobiology in the School of Medicine.
Both graduate programs have equivalent course work and research requirements for the Ph.D. degree, and they closely coordinate their policies and activities. During their first year, students in the Neuroscience Track follow a course of study designed jointly by both graduate programs that provides suitable preparation for either path to a Ph.D
