Topic “Postdoctoral Fellowships”

The UCLA Post-Graduate Training Program in Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) is sponsored by the Cousins Center and the National Institute of Mental Health. The program serves as a major campus facilitator for bridging training in the fields of behavioral science, neuroscience, and immunology and is the sole comprehensive campus training program integrating concerns of basic and clinical immunologists with those of a wide range of neuroscientists and behavioral investigators. 

The goal of the Post-Graduate Training Program is to provide a multi-disciplinary education and training to postdoctoral students from various backgrounds, chosen by virtue of their past records in creative and innovative research. Fellows work on their own projects under the mentorship of selected faculty who have a proven record of PNI research excellence. Fellows also interact with Cousins Center faculty and other fellows through a weekly seminar in psychoneuroimmunology.

Our overall approach is to inform clinical understanding through state-of-the-art behavioral, neurobiological, neuroimmunological and neuroendocrinological techniques. By combining a high level of methodological sophistication about clinically relevant issues and mechanisms with a firm grounding in neuroscience and immunology, we believe that the scientific knowledge base of PNI will be markedly advanced, and that this effort will illuminate the role of psychosocial factors in immune-related diseases and the mechanisms by which such factors transduce experience to biology.

PNI is a scientific field that investigates bi-directional interactions among the neural, endocrine, and immune systems, and biobehavioral mechanisms that underlie the onset and progression of immune-related human disease. Given its broad faculty resources, the program familiarizes trainees with the diversity of information that is necessary for creative problem solving in basic and clinical PNI research, and provides a supportive yet critical research training environment with one-on-one supervision of research fellows.

The Post-Doctoral Fellowship Program in Neuropsychology aims to prepare the next generation of scientist-practitioners for careers in academic research and clinical applications within the specialty area of neuropsychology. The program achieves its goals through training in a series of tracks, including both Academic/Research and Clinician/Educator emphases. Tracks with an Academic/Research emphasis are designed to prepare applicants for academic careers in teaching and clinical research, and tracks with Clinician/Educator emphases are designed to prepare applicants for private or hospital-based practice providing neuropsychological services and advanced training in clinical neuropsychology. All Fellows, regardless of track, will receive broad training and experience in both research and clinical practice. The difference between tracks is their allocation of major rotation and elective time. All tracks individually tailor the Fellow's training program to achieve these goals in light of the Fellow's prior competencies and experiences.

The postdoctoral programs currently include support 12 trainees in 6 tracks, including: General; Child; Geropsychology; Neurology of Aging; HIV/AIDS Research; Neuropsychology Research.

Other programs

The Division of Medical Psychology-Neuropsychology offers internship and externship programs, in addition to the program as described above; UCLA also supports a wide diversity of training programs in disciplines highly relevant to psychology and neuroscience.  Please be sure to look for offerings through other departments and programs in the David Geffen School of Medicine, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, UCLA Brain Research Institute, and the UCLA Department of Psychology.

The NeuroImaging Training Program (NITP) at UCLA was created in September of 2006, under the aegis of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, with funding from the National Institutes of Health. It is premised on the view that the scientific leaders of tomorrow are those who have the ability to create the tools they need to make the discoveries they seek.