Faculty at Emory and Georgia Tech are training young scientists in how to use the tools of biomedical computation to solve challenging problems of neuroscience.

A new five-year grant of $1.6 million from the National Institutes of Health will create a training center in computational neuroscience, one of only five national training centers supported by the NIH through its NIH Blueprint training grant program.

The grant is entitled “From cells to systems and applications: computational neuroscience training at Emory and Georgia Tech.” Principal investigators are Dieter Jaeger, PhD, professor of biology, Emory University and Garrett Stanley, PhD, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. 

“The NIH Blueprint training grants are particularly innovative in that they combine undergraduate and graduate training programs and provide trainee support at both levels,” says Jaeger. “This is a mission that is highly synergistic with the training mission at Emory and Georgia Tech.”

The NIH Blueprint is a framework to enhance cooperative activities among 16 NIH Institutes, Centers, and Offices that support research on the nervous system.

The core training group will initially consist of 16 faculty members from departments spanning Emory University School of Medicine (physiology, neurology, anesthesiology, biomedical engineering) and Emory College of Arts and Sciences (biology, psychology) as well as Georgia Tech (biomedical engineering, electrical engineering)

“This impressive range of faculty and departments provides testimony to the highly collaborative and interdisciplinary nature of this field of study at Georgia Tech and Emory,” notes Stanley.

The training grant funds students in the Emory Neuroscience Program and the joint Emory/Georgia Tech BME PhD program, and undergraduates on both campuses.