Biological/Neuroscience PhD tracts via Psychology Departments

[agrizz]

I'm just curious how many active on this site have applied to psychology phd programs to specialize in biological psychology/neuroscience.  It seems that a lot of psychology peeps here are clinical or school psych.  

 

If there are any like me out there, have you also applied to any neuroscience-specific programs?  

 

Have you heard back about interviews yet?

 

 

[gliaful]

So, I'm not "like you" (in the sense that you mentioned -- my track is molecular/cellular neuro), but I definitely encountered this overlap phenomenon when I was looking at schools.

It seemed, though, that at the sample of schools I looked at, any psychology faculty who had research interests in biological psychology/neuroscience were specifically located in the neuroscience department/program. For a lot of schools, the names of faculty are listed without their research area and I had to click on all 40-100 names to see who was doing what. For some of the neuroscience programs, a LOT of the faculty are actually psychology faculty (see Univ of Iowa's neuro program, where psychology is actually a first-year required course -- I recently learned this).

 

I would tend to believe that faculty who are only located in a school's psych program and NOT additionally in the school's neuro program are not going to be working on anything too biological/neurosciency, but this is my hardly-informed inference.

 

After looking at enough programs and faculty, I began to quickly identify psychology faculty in neuroscience programs. They use the word "neurobiology" A LOT. "Our lab studies the neurobiology of X", etc.

 

Are all of the programs you applied to psychology programs? I don't know when those programs send out invites. If they're neuroscience programs, then you'll probably be hearing back soon.

Edited January 7, 2015 by pasteltomato

[agrizz]

So, I'm not "like you" (in the sense that you mentioned -- my track is molecular/cellular neuro), but I definitely encountered this overlap phenomenon when I was looking at schools.

It seemed, though, that at the sample of schools I looked at, any psychology faculty who had research interests in biological psychology/neuroscience were specifically located in the neuroscience department/program. For a lot of schools, the names of faculty are listed without their research area and I had to click on all 40-100 names to see who was doing what. For some of the neuroscience programs, a LOT of the faculty are actually psychology faculty (see Univ of Iowa's neuro program, where psychology is actually a first-year required course -- I recently learned this).

 

I would tend to believe that faculty who are only located in a school's psych program and NOT additionally in the school's neuro program are not going to be working on anything too biological/neurosciency, but this is my hardly-informed inference.

 

After looking at enough programs and faculty, I began to quickly identify psychology faculty in neuroscience programs. They use the word "neurobiology" A LOT. "Our lab studies the neurobiology of X", etc.

 

Are all of the programs you applied to psychology programs? I don't know when those programs send out invites. If they're neuroscience programs, then you'll probably be hearing back soon.

 

I'd looked at easily 30+ schools in the southeast and saw the same thing.  There were a lot of psychology/psychiatry faculty involved in the neuroscience programs as well as in the psych departments' programs themselves.  And like you, while clicking on all 40-100 names individually (ugh), I began to find some researchers in psychology departments that did not also work with the neuroscience programs.  

 

In my case, it appears that my research interests (neurobiology of stress, decision making, addiction and/or psychiatric disorders in behaving animals) may be more often conducted by a psych faculty member (concurrent neuro appointment or not).  What appealed to me more, though, was that I could, most often, skip the laboratory rotations and start right away with the POI.  

 

Re: interviews - I'm not really sure what the trends are, because it appears that past updates on this site from the past few years appear to have no trend (other than early Jan-late Feb.  That said, I am seeing a few people updating info now about interviews, but not clearly defining whether they are clinical or not.  

[EMGagne]

I'm applying to mostly psych PhD programs with the plan to be in either a cog neuro, integrated neuro, or behavioral neuro track.  I applied to the Behavior, Cognition, and Neuroscience program at American University, and also the Neuroscience and Behavior program at UMass Amherst.  All the other neuro programs I came across were way too focused on the cellular/molecular aspects for my interests.

 

I've had a few email exchanges with POI's over the past few months, but it's been silent since the application deadlines.  I'm not really sure if you would call the previous email conversations interviews (I don't - I would really only count official interviews as such), but either way I haven't heard anything official from any school.

 

It doesn't look like we're applying to any of the same places, but it seems as though not a ton of psych decisions or official interview offers have gone out yet.

[fec]

I applied to two Psychology programs: WUSTL's Behavior, Brain and Cognition and GA Tech's Cognitive & Brain Science.  I haven't heard back from either, yet.

[urdudrkr]

I applied to 10 Universities of which 2 are Neuroscience, 1 is cog&neuroscience and rest are Behavioral neuroscience in Psychology Department. I haven't got back from any yet. I think I have  got reject from the Neuroscience program which i applied to after seeing the results blog. I am alo on of you guys who's anxiously waiting for results. Any luck for anyone? and any idea when we might be hearing back from them?

[neuroticneuro]

I saw a Stanford Neuro post on the results search. Anybody hear from them?

[madmacmaddie2]

On 1/8/2015 at 1:33 PM, fec said:

I applied to two Psychology programs: WUSTL's Behavior, Brain and Cognition, and GA Tech's Cognitive & Brain Science.  I haven't heard back from either, yet.

 

 

I applied to both of those also! We should keep each other posted!

[TXInstrument11]

I applied to Baylor's Psychology Ph.D. intending to go into the behavioral neuroscience track. Most neuro programs were way too cognition/perception oriented for my tastes and many of the social and criminology programs I decided to apply to have elective neuro components. 

 

Searching for neuro research matching my interests was hard. Browsing university websites, I typically landed in clinical or dry visual perception stuff by sticking with those keywords, prompting me to stick with social psych most of the time.

 

Slowly, I think, more and more of your classic programs like developmental and social will have more neuro/physio-oriented faculty. At least to me, it seemed like it was often the case that one or two fresh grads were brought in to round out the departments with your rare established neuro researcher as a non-core faculty. 

 

Maybe there aren't enough behavioral neuro folks to go around to create distinct departments? Either way, I welcome the integration.

After all, most of the infinite variations of 'neuro' are stupidly confusing, especially when they are almost empty buzzwords like I feel to be the case with "neuroeconomics" and "neurolaw". 

[agrizz]

I applied to Baylor's Psychology Ph.D. intending to go into the behavioral neuroscience track. 

To whose lab did you apply?

[TXInstrument11]

To whose lab did you apply?

Matthew Stanford's and Bradley Keele's.