Neuroscience Research and Study Opportunities

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 Fellowships

Neuroscience Conferences

Neuroscience Relevant Accounts on Twitter

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.