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Overview of Program

Inquiry Across Scale: From Genes to Cognition

With a 2010 $1 million award from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Duke University will support undergraduate research in Inquiry across Scale: From Genes to Cognition, an interdisciplinary program that emphasizes collaborative inquiry across scale in rapidly developing areas of scientific research.

A deep understanding of complex, important issues, such as sensation and perception, motor control, learning and memory, attention, communication, decision making, and other underpinnings of behavior, must be founded upon interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and integrative approaches. Such investigations require the complex tools of multiple disciplines and inquiry across scale, from the genetic, cellular, and molecular levels to the circuit, cognitive, and behavioral levels.  This research is best performed by highly interactive teams of faculty and students, and these teams must have the skills to collaborate, to work across approaches and scales, to understand the methods and concepts of multiple disciplines, and to think creatively across traditional boundaries.  Only then will they be fully equipped to address the research questions that drive science forward and translate those discoveries into solutions for societal problems.

In pursuing our Inquiry across Scale program, we will continue to develop our Research Fellows undergraduate research program and tailor our Vertically Integrated Partners (VIP) research teams of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates to address research questions in five areas: Neuroimmunology, Genetic and Physiological Regulation of Body Size, Neural Mechanism and Decision Making, Primate Genomics, and Molecular Biology and Evolution of Olfactory Circuits.