Training
It’s a huge privilege to be able to work on whatever you’re curious about. Science is scary because you don’t know what’s gonna happen - if you did it wouldn’t be science - and I think that’s most clear in a department like this, where people have core values of curiosity and intense engagement in each other’s work.
The discipline of neuroscience is defined by the quest to understand the most complex biological system in existence, the nervous system. Neuroscience demands its practitioners be able to draw from, synthesize, and advance the knowledge and experimental approaches born from fields spanning genetics, molecular and cellular biology, and biochemistry to physics, computer science, and engineering. It is increasingly clear that the next generation of neuroscientists needs to be broadly fluent in all of these areas, as well as rigorously trained in experimental design, statistical methodologies, and advanced quantitative reasoning.