University of Pittsburgh - Department of Neuroscience

Chairman, Alan Sved, Ph. D.

About the Department of Neuroscience

The Department of Neuroscience is located within the university's School of Arts and Sciences. The department, established in 1986 as an expansion of the program in Behavioral Neuroscience, was founded on the notion that Neuroscience was an up and coming discipline that belonged as an undergraduate major and a field of graduate study.

The Undergraduate Program attracts a relatively large and academically successful group of majors, the great majority of whom go on to medical or graduate school. The faculty and graduate students form a substantial component of the campus-wide Center for Neuroscience at the University of Pittsburgh (CNUP), an organization that serves the entire community of neuroscientists at this institution.

	Our faculty are a distinguished group of scientific investigators; they are very productive in the laboratory, and they have received numerous grants and awards for their research. Also distinctive are the collegial interactions that occur among the faculty members, which provide new ideas and approaches to their research programs. The total number of faculty members with primary tenure-stream appointments is 13, and faculty size has been increased to to approximately 25 by the addition of faculty members with a primary departmental appointment outside the tenure stream and faculty members with secondary appointments whose primary appointments are elsewhere on campus or at neighboring Carnegie Mellon University.

Our doctoral training program in the CNUP is thriving. We draw from a large pool of excellent applicants, and our students develop first-rate academic and research skills as they progress towards a Ph.D. degree. Our small Masters Degree program is also thriving and our undergraduate program similarly is excellent. Our courses are well taught and demanding, and each year we attract a sizable group of outstanding students despite the fact that students with interests in the biomedical sciences typically do not enter college aware of neuroscience as a discipline. A remarkable number of these undergraduate students participate actively in the laboratory research programs of our faculty. Thus, the Department's faculty represent a group of dedicated instructors and mentors as well as scientists.

Ericka Holmstrand and Susan Sesack, Ph. D. discuss an image taken at the Electron Microscope facility

Vince McGinty discusses a recent poster and his related research

The major strengths of the Department of Neuroscience are its personnel -- faculty, graduate students, research associates, and staff -- and their commitment to excellence in teaching, training, and research. There is in the department a strong sense of respect for one another's talents, accomplishments, and personal integrity, a sense of communal mission with regard to our aspirations and goals in research and teaching, and a sense of confidence that we know what has to be done and can do it.

The Department was established only fifteen years ago, but already it has become successful and prominent based on the determination, energy, imagination, and skills of its faculty as investigators and as mentors, and on the support of the institution and the funding agencies. Consequently, morale is high and so is our optimism that we will continue to develop and maintain a world-class department.

Department Goals and Objectives

To promote outstanding programs of research and scholarship in Neuroscience. Put simply, research is the engine that drives the department.

To provide outstanding instruction and training in Neuroscience to students at the undergraduate and graduate levels. Undergraduate students require a general education in science that will enable them to think logically and critically, and encourage them to seek understanding, regardless of their ultimate career goals. Graduate students require training that will enable them to become successful, independent scientific investigators.

Finally, as citizens of the University of Pittsburgh we accept the responsibility to provide service within the larger University community and the still larger public community on matters that concern the function of the nervous system, including mental health and neurological diseases as well as more general matters of education in science.

Department of Neuroscience
A210 Langley Hall
5th and Ruskin Avenues
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
(412) 624-5043