Associated Departments and Programs
Faculty and students in the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences have strong ties to several other departments and programs within the University.
The department of Computer Science has 20 full-time faculty and about 45
graduate students. Its programs are particularly strong in the areas of computer vision and robotics, knowledge
representation and natural language understanding, systems software for parallel computing, and the theory of computation.
It enjoys strong collaborative contacts with faculty in several other departments, and has a major involvement in the
cognitive sciences at the University.
The department of Linguistics operates in close cooperation with the Center
for Language Sciences (CLS), which serves as the focus of a distinguished interdisciplinary community with research and
teaching interests in natural language. Faculty within the Department of Linguistics have expertise in syntax, semantics,
phonology, and morphology. The linguistics faculty actively participate in research and training in computational
linguistics and psycholinguistics. In addition, they play a central role in teaching and advising students of linguistics
and the language sciences from the following Ph.D. programs: computer science, brain and cognitive sciences, and
philosophy.
The department of Music Theory at Eastman School of Music provides
instruction in music theory at all degree levels. Faculty and graduate students in the department study many kinds of
music from a variety of perspectives. In partnership with the department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, the theory
department actively supports study and research in music cognition; see
http://www.theory.esm.rochester.edu/music-cognition/
for more details.
The Interdepartmental Graduate Program in Neuroscience
draws together more than 60 faculty in nearly 15 departments in the School of Medicine and Dentistry and in the College
(the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences is one of these). In this multi-disciplinary program, students examine
the organization and function of the nervous system on several levels. The program is formally constituted to provide
graduate training leading to the Ph.D. in neuroscience, but it also offers a range of activities (for example, seminars
and journal clubs) which bring together neuroscientists from all of the participating departments and disciplines. (For
those interested in pursuing Ph.D. studies in neuroscience at the University of Rochester, see the
neuroscience programs cluster.)
The department of Neurobiology and Anatomy, within
the School of Medicine and Dentistry, maintains strong commitments to research as well as to graduate, medical, and
undergraduate education. Over thirty faculty with primary and secondary appointments in the department are actively
engaged in research on the structure and function of the nervous system across a variety of levels of inquiry. Areas of
interest cover a broad spectrum, with a strong emphasis on the neurobiology of sensory-motor systems, neuro-engineering
and computational neuroscience, and also including cell signaling and transmission, development and aging, neurobiology
of disease, learning and plasticity.
The Center for Language Sciences draws together faculty and students with a common interest
in natural languages, including an understanding of the linguistic structure, processing and production, and acquisition
of both spoken and signed languages. Members of the Center come from four departments in the University and employ the
methods of behavioral research, theoretical linguistics, computational modeling, philosophical analysis, and
neurolinguistic studies to investigate how languages of the world are formed, processed, and learned.
The Center for Visual Science promotes research on vision by bringing together
scientists from a variety of disciplines. Members of the Center, drawn from five departments within the University,
employ a variety of approaches (psychophysical, computational, physiological, anatomical, optical, and clinical) to study
a range of problems, including the optical limits on visual performance, the neural analysis of spatiotemporal and
chromatic information, cortical mechanisms of motion perception, the neural control of eye movements, and visuo-motor
coordination.