I am working in department of biomedical engineering, Amirkabir University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. In our department people are working in different groups (biomaterial engineering, biomechanical engineering, medical imaging, bioelectronics engineering, tissue engineering, bioinstrumentation engineering, biomedical signal processing, and …). We want to add a new group with the focus on neuroscience (please note that we work in an engineering & technology university and our works should not be pure medical). The current suggestion for the name of this new group is Neuro-Cognitive Engineering. However some of us think that there can be better names. Those members in our department who want to be involved in this new group have some different expertise: some are expert in computational neuroscience, some in artificial neural networks, and some in rehabilitation.
Can you please help me in answering the following questions?
1. Is “Neuro-Cognitive Engineering” meaningful? Is there any such thing anywhere else?
2. According to my explanations, can you propose a better name?
3. Are you agree with adding a new group? Some suggest doing such projects in other groups and not adding a new one. What can be the costs and benefits of adding a new group?
4. Some say that neuroscience will be the most important field in biomedical engineering in near future (or even now). Is that true?
5. What courses can be proper for students who want to study in this new group? I will appreciate if you introduce a department in which those courses are taught.
Thank you very much,
Sajad
Dear Sajad,
1 and 2- In most of universities or research institutes, there exist some centers and labs which work in the area of computational and cognitive neuroscience. Therefore, for the name of the group, I suggest to pick a more general title, for example "Computational Cognitive Neuroscience" or "Brain, Mind and Computational Science". In my opinion, the term "Neuro-Cognitive Engineering" does not make much sense neither in computational science nor in cognitive neuroscience.
3- The current approaches, methods, ideas and generally speaking, state of the art in neuroscience sound to be much wider than being restricted in a sub-group such as bio-electrical engineering. I highly recommend to establish a new independent group different sub- groups to focus on different aspects of neuroscience related data analysis, modeling and computational sciences.
4- I believe it is true. Fore more certainty, I suggest you to look at the list of the advertised PhD, Postdoctoral, research assistance and so on in the area of neuroscience and compare it with the other areas of study. You can also search about fund providers who has preferred to invest a lot on research in different branches of neuroscience.
5- Maybe you find the following link helpful:
https://web.stanford.edu/group/mbc/graduate_training.html
Regards,
Fatemeh
Hi,
I personally believe the more familiar terms would work better, e.g. "neural engineering" and "computational neuroscience". Here comes some comparisons:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-Computational-Neuroscience-and-Neural-Engineering
Regarding the appropriate courses, apart from general ones like statistics, machine learning, signal/image processing, brain imaging, there are some more suggestions in the link below:
http://kiwas.ki.se/katalog/katalog/kurserByCourseLevel/10
Best,
Neda
- Badges
- Science topic
- Similar topics
- Biological Science
- Neuroscience