Association of Neuroscience Departments
and Programs

The 2000 ANDP Survey of Neuroscience Graduate, Postdoctoral, & Undergraduate Programs 

Edward M. Stricker, Ph.D., University of Pittsburgh

The report is also available in pdf format for printing. 

Introduction

Neuroscience Departments and Programs are relatively new entities, being virtually unknown 35 years ago. By now they are plentiful, diverse in organization and goals, and still evolving. For years the ANDP has attempted to monitor that evolution by characterizing the departments and programs along several important dimensions so that we can know ourselves better (i.e., bench-marking) and present ourselves better to our colleagues, our deans, and our students.

Previous ANDP surveys of graduate and postdoctoral training in North America were conducted in 1986 by Michael Zigmond, in 1991 by Linda Spear, and in 1998 (see 1998 ANDP Survey) by Lesly Huffman, Robert Fellows, and Ronald Schoenfeld.^1,2 In 2000, we wanted to initiate an annual survey that focused on the most critical issues and allowed current information about the academic discipline to be readily available. Thus, in August 2000 we asked directors of member programs to complete a survey so promptly that its results could be analyzed in time for presentation in a Forum at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience on 4 November 2000, in New Orleans. To facilitate this response, we eliminated several questions from the past survey, and  also conducted the survey electronically.

There were two versions of the survey, one intended for graduate and postdoctoral programs, as in previous years, and one intended for undergraduate programs, for the first time. The present report provides the results of both surveys. The two survey questionnaires were posted on the ANDP web site between mid-August 2000 and December 2000, and program members in the ANDP were asked to complete and submit data electronically to the University Center for Social and Urban Research (UCSUR) at the University of Pittsburgh, which helped in designing the surveys and was responsible for compiling the obtained responses. Completed questionnaires were received from 81 graduate neuroscience departments and programs, and from 24 undergraduate neuroscience departments and programs. It is difficult to be certain what percentage of North American programs in Neuroscience are represented by these responses because there has never been an accurate count of all programs. Be that as it may, 50% (81/163) of graduate programs in Neuroscience that are active members of the ANDP submitted responses to the survey. Of those 81 graduate programs, 51 (63%) also participated in the 1998 survey, and many of them no doubt participated as well in the previous two surveys, enabling the results of these surveys to be compared meaningfully. Similarly, 49% (24/49) of undergraduate programs in Neuroscience that are active members of ANDP responded to the first survey of undergraduate programs. Many programs communicated their regrets about not participating because they were still too new or had not yet begun to track the information we had requested. The results of the two surveys were entered into a database at UCSUR for subsequent analysis.

Complete lists of the programs that participated in the two surveys are given below. The institutions with graduate programs represented a broad cross-section of Neuroscience departments and programs. That is, responses were obtained from large institutions and small institutions, from older programs and newer programs, from programs with many students and programs with relatively few students, from programs located in medical schools and from programs located in schools of arts and sciences (or both). Almost all of the programs were located in the United States, in 29 states plus the District of Columbia, but a few responses also were obtained from institutions in three Canadian provinces. The results reported below represent all the responses obtained from all the institutions excepting responses from the Canadian institutions to questions regarding faculty citizenship and U.S. racial and ethnic minority groups, which were excluded. The institutions with undergraduate programs in the neural sciences were similarly diverse, and were located in13 states and two Canadian provinces. 

The results have been organized for presentation in the following nine categories. The first six categories summarize the results regarding graduate and postdoctoral training. Whenever possible, current results are compared with those obtained from the previous ANDP surveys. The seventh category summarizes the responses regarding undergraduate training. The final two categories provide a summary of the major findings of the two surveys and the conclusions drawn. A specific index of these nine categories is as follows: 

Results

(1) Zigmond, M.J. and Spear, L.P. Neuroscience training in the USA and Canada: observations and suggestions, Trends in Neuroscience 15:379-383, 1992.
(2) Huffman, L., Fellows, R.E., and Schoenfeld, R.I. The 1998 ANDP survey of neuroscience graduate & postdoctoral programs. 

Participating Institutions

February 22, 2007

Copyright © 2001 Association of Neuroscience Departments and Programs, Bethesda, MD