Wiring Brain Research

Course goals

This course is part of the interdisciplinary minor “Brain, mind and consciousness” and serves as the ‘capita’ of this minor.
The core aims of this course are
1. to get a multidisciplinary overview of ongoing brain research at Utrecht Science Park (USP)
2. to further develop your individual competency in interdisciplinary research in the context of brain function.
Throughout the minor, students have been taught to look at brain-related problems from multiple perspectives and to work in multidisciplinary teams on complex problems that need an interdisciplinary perspective. However, during these courses you have always tackled these problems as a team. This course offers a more in-depth training to develop your individual competency in interdisciplinary research in the context of brain function and you will be challenged to link your individual interdisciplinary research to the framework of ongoing brain research at USP. After completion of the course, you will be able to individually perform and report on an interdisciplinary (literature) study.

Content

The course starts with making an inventory of ongoing brain research at Utrecht Science Park. You will use several sources (research group / company websites, recently published literature, news items) to gather their information and build a mind map of the different research themes, disciplines involved and putative collaborations between disciplines. You will all interview a researcher working on one of those themes, and share your insights, to get a more comprehensive overview of the type of research questions, how research questions are answered and of the usability of their methods. This framework will form the foundation for your individual project, in which you will individually perform a literature study on a topic of choice. You can freely choose any topic related to brain function, as long as the problem/question studied meets the requirements for interdisciplinary research. Within the course, supportive education is offered in relation to the different steps within the interdisciplinary research process and feedback on this process and the content of the project is provided by both peers and teacher at several dedicated moments during the project.