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IMAGINE:
Ithaca Manhattan Graduate Initiative in Neuroscience

Prospective students interested in combining the strengths of the Field of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York with the Neuroscience Program at Weill Cornell Medical College are encouraged to apply to a recently-developed joint program which already boasts some of the strongest students of each graduate program separately.

The program in Cornell-Ithaca specializes in basic analysis of perception, cognition, communication and decision making, grounded in developmental and evolutionary perspectives, with a strong computational emphasis.

Weill Cornell is an outstanding research facility for investigation of the development, structure, and function of the nervous system, particularly in the areas of attention, learning and language, using a wide variety of scientific disciplines, including pharmacology, neuroanatomy, electrophysiology, imaging, genomic and transgenic approaches within animal models and specific clinical populations.

In general, students will begin their fundamental training on the Ithaca campus, and continue in Weill, with joint mentorship, two annual meetings and teleconferenced seminars to integrate their graduate experience throughout the training, though considerable flexibility is possible depending on the particular project of interest and source of funding. Students will emerge from this training with exceptional training in both how to choose and design research questions and how to apply this skill in clinical settings with the most current and powerful techniques.

How does a graduate program on two
geographically separated campuses work? 
 
 

Subsidy and institutional support
Both campuses are committed to making admissions and registration in the linked programs transparent and easy.  A bus, with large, comfortable seats, working room and internet access and other minor amenities runs twice a day between the two campuses, and it is free to graduate students. Finding housing in the Ithaca campus is usually unproblematic, and graduate housing on the Manhattan campus is subsidized, through application.  A yearly meeting of all the training staff and students, alternating campuses is also fully supported.  The training faculty are accustomed to this arrangement, and we can refer you to a number of former students who can describe how they worked it out in each particular case. 

Technology
The ever-increasing availability of internet communication has already been used to advantage by this program, and will only increase.  So far, we have had at least one jointly-led, teleconferenced graduate seminar per year for the last three years.  Individual graduate committees meet in the same way, by either tele- or telephone conference. 

Quality of Life: The best of two worlds
Students who take part in this program have the chance to experience the best of two very different worlds. New York City and the surrounding are is exciting and considered the "greatest city on earth," and Ithaca is an extraordinarily beautiful, peaceful, country-like setting with its majestic gorges and rolling hills near the Finger lakes. Those people who would like access to both these enriching, yet drastically different, environments do not have to choose one over the other in this program!

Complementary specialization
Like the two hemispheres of the brain, each campus has specialized in the aspects of cognitive neuroscience. The Medical School was originally on the Ithaca campus, but was moved to Manhattan to provide a greater diversity of medical experience. The Ithaca campus emphasizes ecological and computational approaches to perception and cognition, and makes use of the very strong evolutionary biology on campus.  Running experiments on children and adults in non-medical settings is easy and inexpensive.  By contrast,  Weill  has an exceptionally strong medically-based neuroscience and psychiatry program, with great strength in genomics, imaging, and their interactions in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience, and access to clinical populations.  Given the strengths of both campuses, students in the IMAGINE program obtain extensive training in a number of complementary research approaches and research instrumentation working with diverse human and nonhuman populations.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
     
 
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