Throughout the 1980s and 1990s neuroscientists on Columbia’s two campuses began to collaborate increasingly in their teaching activities. Yet the balkanized nature of the neuroscience teaching efforts made it difficult to recruit the best students and to create a coherent graduate training program. Eventually the collegial spirit and the academic resources were in place to combine the efforts of a number of faculty members to create a new, free-standing doctoral program in neuroscience.
In 1996 the NYS Department of Education approved the consolidation of these separate training programs into a new interdepartmental, uptown-downtown Doctoral Subcommittee in Neurobiology and Behavior, co-directed by Darcy Kelley (Department of Biological Sciences) and John Koester. This program is empowered to devise curricula, direct thesis research and grant the Ph.D. degree.
Today the Doctoral Program in Neurobiology and Behavior has over 80 faculty mentors They are based in the Department of Neuroscience, as well as in the Departments of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Biological Sciences, Biomedical Engineering, Genetics and Development, Neurology, Pathology and Cell Biology, Pharmacology, Physiology and Cellular Biophysics, Psychiatry, Psychology, and Statistics. There are currently 82 students enrolled in the program.
