Thousands of study and academic opportunities in Neuroscience are available internationally. Conferences and summer schools in Neuroscience are organized regularly in the best academic centers of the world. The majority of universities and many foundations also offer BA, MA, and Ph.D. programs in Neuroscience as wells as postdoctoral research grants, awards, and fellowships. Below you will find the updated list of international opportunities available in Neuroscience.
Neuroscience Scholarships
- Neuroscience Research Training Program
- UW Madison Neurobiology Major Scholarships
- UAB Undergraduate Neuroscience Program Scholarship
- La Sierra University Psychology & Neuroscience Programs Scholarships
- Dalhousie University Department of Psychology and Neuroscience Scholarships
- World-Leading St. Andrews Scholarship in Neuroscience
- The University of Texas at Austin Department of Neuroscience Scholarship
- Neuroscience Scholars Program, Society for Neuroscience
- IUPUI Scholarship Opportunities
- BYU Neuroscience Center Scholarship
Neuroscience Fellowships
- Stanford Clinical Neurology Fellowships
- Columbia University Medical Center Department of Neuroscience Postdoctoral Fellowships
- Janssen Fellowship in Translational Neuroscience Research
- University of Pittsburgh Department of Neuroscience Fellowships
- Einstein Center for Neurosciences Berlin-PhD Fellowships
- NINDS Postdoctoral Training Fellowships
- Carnegie Mellon University Neuroscience Institute Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellowship Program
- Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship in Neuroscience
- The University of Arizona Health Sciences Neurology Fellowships
- Swedish Neuroscience Institute Fellowships
Neuroscience Conferences
- Nature Reviews Neuroscience Conferences
- Society for Neuroscience Calendar
- The British Neuroscience Association Events
- Australian Neuroscience Association Conferences
- Cognitive Neuroscience Society Annual Meeting
- Mediterranean Neuroscience Society Conference
- Conference on Cognitive Computational Neuroscience
- American Association of Neuroscience Nurses Annual Education Meeting
- Precision Neuroscience Conference
- Australasian Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conferences
Neuroscience Relevant Accounts on Twitter
- @NeuroscienceNew
- @NatureNeuro
- @simplyneurosci
- @SfNtweets
- @Neuroscience
- @ELSneuroscience
- @bcm_neurosci
- @biorxiv_neursci
- @FrontNeurosci
- @OxNeuro
Neuroscience as a discipline
Neuroscience focuses on one of the essential health aspects: the nervous system. Through neuroscience, humans get information on how the nervous system works and how it develops and reaches certain structures. The discipline examines how the brain impacts human behavior and cognitive functions.
Neuroscience is not only about exploring the normal state of the nervous system. It also, and most importantly, works to understand how the human brain's breakdowns and other activities are related to breakdowns in the nervous system. Thanks to this disciplined approach, many widespread diseases such as autism, schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, and others have a promise to be explored in detail and treated. Some diseases already found treatment with the help of neuroscientist efforts. Since the 1950's research and practice activities in the field, treatments for stroke, cardiovascular disease, and multiple sclerosis were found.
The topics of neuroscience, as well as interest and actions towards exploring them, always existed. Therefore, it might be stated neuroscience as a sphere of activity is not new. However, it was recently officially formed as a separate discipline and not just a part of biology.
Neuroscience develops and deepens in studies due to its links with mathematics, engineering, chemistry, computer science, philosophy, psychology, and medicine.
You might often meet the definition of neuroscience as a discipline that mainly focuses on studying brain activities and structure. That can be partially true because neuroscientists study the general network of nerve cells in the body, and the brain is the body's nerve center.
Subdivisions of Neuroscience
Below are the main branches of Neuroscience, and usually, scientists of the field focus on more than one of them.
Affective neuroscience: the research activities using animals in laboratories to understand neurons' behavior concerning emotions.
Behavioral neuroscience: the research on how exactly the brain affects behavior.
Cellular neuroscience: focuses on the neurons' physiological properties and shape at a cellular level.
Cognitive neuroscience: aims to understand how humans' cognitive behavior is related to their neural system.
Computational neuroscience: with the help of math, physics, and computational field functions, the method tries to understand how brains compute.
Cultural neuroscience: examines the impact of beliefs, notions, and cultural patterns on the brains and genes.
Developmental neuroscience: examines the development of the nervous system at a cellular level.
Neuroengineering: carries research of a neural system from the perspective of engineering techniques.
Neuroinformatics is the process of collecting and integrating all the neuroscience areas' data to better understand the brain and related diseases.
Neurolinguistics: studies of how the brain controls the person's interaction with languages, such as acquiring a new language and its utterance.
Social neuroscience: explores the relationship of biological systems and social processes.
Neuroscience Studies and Career Applications
Basically, everything described above and even more is taught during academic neuroscience programs. To break in smaller details, neuroscience students explore the topics like:
- Immunology
- Hormones and Behavior
- Cell Structure and Function
- Animal Behavior
- Calculus
- Sensation and Perception
- Neurobiology of Memory
- Learning
- Genetics
- Organic Chemistry
Neuroscience students should love maths, data, and digging deep into the smallest details, as the discipline is mainly about the mentioned skills. The studies of this major require quantitative and analytical skills. Besides acquiring a lot of data, students should also implement it and form new knowledge, which can be further applied in practice.
Usually, before shifting from neuroscience student to neuroscience specialist, there are certain requirements for additional training and acquiring licenses, as the field is highly responsible. For example, in the US, one should gain Medical Doctor training, complete a medical residency and pass the US Medical Licensing Examination in order to start treating patients and doing clinical work.
Also, it's worth participating in postdoctoral lab fellowships, as this would be an excellent benefit for the newly graduated person's experience leading to more accessible employment opportunities.
Neuroscience has a broad practical utility in psychobiology, so many neuroscientist studies can lead to psychology careers. In fact, by understanding the neural system and the cause-effect relationship of human behavior, specialists can easily identify the dependence between the neural process and the person's psychological state.
As a sum up, there are the main employment opportunities for neuroscience graduates:
- neurosurgeon
- neurologist
- psychiatrist
- researchers
- neuropathologist
- neuroanatomist
- neurobiologist, etc.
Neurosciences' description sounds like an exciting scenario of a fantasy film: understanding the processes behind people's actions and attempting to control them. We hope this section of ARMACAD will help you succeed in this discipline with a unique concept.