Initiative on Neurosciences at UMass Amherst

The Initiative on Neurosciences (IONs) is an effort to bring together all of the different aspects related to brain research on the UMass Amherst campus. Paul Katz was hired by UMass a year ago to be the director of Neurosciences. In May, IONs organized a UMass Interdisciplinary Neurosciences conference that featured faculty from 4 colleges speaking about research in the Neurosciences and two outside speakers, Wolfram Schultz (Cambridge University), a leader in the field of neural mechanisms underlying reward and Graeme Davis (UCSF), a UMass alumnus who is well recognized for his work on synapses. This year, IONs is hosting a bi-weekly Neurosciences Faculty Forum an informal venue for faculty to share research ideas. Oct 29-Nov 2, IONs helping to host the UMass “Week of Memory and Forgetting: Science, Senescence, and Society”. In the spring semester, there will be a Distinguished Neurosciences Lecture Series. For more information see https://websites.umass.edu/ions/.

The launch of this initiative is an exciting development, and the CogSci initiative looks forward to partnering with IONs for future events in cognitive neuroscience.