What the Students Have to Say:

The Neuroscience Graduate Group

Faculty and students affiliated with UC Davis Neuroscience Grad Group cover the entire spectrum of neuroscience from cellular/molecular to clinical/cognitive, making it possible for every student to create a research project that closely matches his or her own interests. The first year lab rotations provide the flexibility needed to explore unfamiliar areas of neuroscience or to focus on specific research interests. -Melissa Prather, Graduate Student in the Amaral Lab At UC Davis, graduate students fall under the jurisdiction of a Graduate Group rather than a Department. This is largely invisible on a day-to-day basis but has its benefits. Faculty for the Neuroscience Graduate Group are assembled from many different Departments, including NPB (Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior), Psychology, Neurology, Psychiatry, and other disciplines related to the field of Neuroscience. This lends the Graduate Group a breadth of collective knowledge and collaboration that would be difficult to achieve in a standard Department. -Jeffrey Johnson, Graduate Student in the Olshausen Lab Since the Neuroscience Graduate Group is not just part of a larger biology program on campus, you really get the sense that we are a neuroscience community. The Center for Neuroscience provides a place where faculty and students can work together to share ideas apart from the hectic atmosphere of the main campus. -Cyndi Mills-Schumann, Graduate Student in the Amaral Lab At UC Davis, instead of calling some departments 'departments', we call them 'Graduate Groups'. Basically this just means that we can pull faculty from several departments; so, here you'll find people who's paycheck says 'Psychology' who've been working for years in the lab next to people who ostensibly work for Psychiatry, Molecular Biology, Computer Science, etc. I'm not sure what difference these distinctions make--all of the faculty teach courses together, side-by-side, including courses in the undergraduate major, Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior (NPB). We have our own big building (two, in fact) with labs, classrooms, conference rooms, a graduate computer lounge, and a library. -Noah Merin, MD/PhD Student in the Amaral Lab Back to What the Students Have to Say!