This T32 training grant supports an integrated pre/postdoctoral program of Training in Social Neuroscience Research for late-stage graduate students and early-stage postdoctoral fellows interested in pursuing careers in the neurobiology of social processing. The overarching goal of our unified and integrated Training Program is to provide rigorous, broad-based, individualized, and multidisciplinary training with enhanced opportunities for mentoring, collaboration, and career development for predoctoral students and postdoctoral fellows  in social neuroscience research relevant to neuropsychiatric disorders. The program serves as a model to formalize the strategies and themes that guide our approach to training, key among them opportunities for bidirectional education, training, and mentoring across our department and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Trainees participate in an integrated program of coursework, laboratory training, testing/evaluation, training activities, teaching opportunities, mentoring, and career development activities.

While focusing on training in basic social neuroscience research, the Training Program exposes students to the range of basic, translational, and clinical scientific approaches and model systems represented at Mount Sinai, from structure/function analysis of individual synapses; to computational modeling of gene, protein, and connectivity networks in healthy and diseased brains; to behavioral, electrophysiological, and imaging studies of a variety of organisms, including humans. The program leverages our expansive basic research in the social neurosciences and strong clinical programs in Psychiatry, Neurology, and Neurosurgery, and facilitates and encourages the interaction of investigators with complementary approaches and backgrounds. Training Faculty are united by a general thematic focus: investigating how molecular/epigenetic phenomenon and synaptic/neural plasticity influence circuit development or function to control social behavior impaired in neurological and psychiatric disease. Mount Sinai offers among the best programs in the country for studying mental health and psychiatric disease across the spectrum of research, from basic science to preclinical models, to clinical research.