PsychologyThe University of Pennsylvania is unusual in that a wide variety of graduate programs and professional schools are all located on the same campus. This includes outstanding graduate programs in such related fields as neuroscience and linguistics, and distinguished schools of law, medicine, veterinary medicine, nursing, engineering, and business (the Wharton School). There are three major hospitals on campus.
Informal interdisciplinary groups of students and faculty abound throughout the University and are facilitate by our Grad G, such as the rich network of collaborations between psychology, neuroscience, and psychiatry. However, some of these groups have attained a formal status that deserves special mention here:
https://mindcore.sas.upenn.edu/
https://web.sas.upenn.edu/penn-sbsi/
Ethnopolitical conflict. Ethnopolitical conflict is one of the major problems facing the world in the 21st century. A group of faculty are engaged in research on the origins of violent conflict includes studies of group stereotyping, group identification, group guilt, group forgiveness, and group aversion - as these contribute to or inhibit mechanisms of mobilization for state and non-state terrorism, ethnic expulsion, coercive assimilation, and genocide. Research is carried out in Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka, and other sites of ethnic conflict, as well as in the United States. Participating in research related to psychology are psychology department graduate group members Clark McCauley, Ian Lustick, Geoff Goodwin, and Paul Rozin.
Neuroscience. Graduate students who are interested in advancing their knowledge of the nervous system are encouraged to take advantage of a wealth of seminars, courses and other programs offered by the Mahoney Institute of Neurological Sciences (MINS). The Institute is an interdisciplinary organization of about 203120 scientists from 14 departments in the four schools - Arts and Sciences (11 from Psychology), Engineering, Medicine and Veterinary Medicine - who are active in neuroscience research. The subdisciplines encompassed by MINS include outstanding groups in Behavioral Neuroscience, Vision, and Computational Neuroscience. Available courses include Behavioral Neuroscience, Systems Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Neuroendocrinology, and Psychopharmacology.
Behavioral Neuroscience. This group, which includes a major component from Psychology, encompasses a range of research from field ethological studies to the neurohumoral basis of feeding and sexual behavior and the role of single neurons in mediating complex behavior (see the section on Faculty Interests for further details).
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. The CCN brings together faculty and students from across the campus to study the neural bases of cognition. CCN researchers use fMRI, ERP, and other methods to image cognitive processes in normal human brains; they also use neuropsychological methods with brain damaged patients. Graduate group faculty and students have been active participants in the CCN.
Perception. Training in perception at Penn emphasizes the development of research programs that draw on a general understanding of perception. The program is theoretically rigorous and offers training in psychophysics, the measurement of neural correlates of sensory and perceptual processing, and computational modeling. Cognitive neuroscience, machine learning, and computer vision are also well represented. Students with backgrounds in mathematics, physics, and engineering are encouraged to apply.
Cognitive Science. Cognitive science investigates the nature of the representations, biological and man-made, that embody our knowledge of the world and of ourselves, and the symbol systems that allow us to communicate and manipulate these representations. The Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania is an interdisciplinary organization comprising many scholars from the Departments of Computer & Information Sciences, Linguistics, Philosophy and Psychology, and is especially known for its depth in the areas of formal analysis of natural and artificial languages and language acquisition. The National Science Foundation has recognized the excellence of the Institute by awarding it the first Science & Technology Center grant ever made for cognitive science, a seven year multi-million dollar award. The Institute sponsors a seminar series, coordinates cognitive science courses at the University, and funds many activities that promote cognitive science.
Decision Processes. A large group of faculty, students, and postdoctoral researchers in several schools are concerned with the empirical analysis of decision making in such fields as health care (by both providers and patients), consumer behavior, economic behavior as studied through laboratory games, risk regulation, and protective behavior. Faculty and students from Psychology, Medicine, the Wharton School and elsewhere, work closely together through individual collaborations, a weekly brown-bag seminar, and lab meetings. See http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~baron/dp.html.