Neuroscience

Overview

The mission of this Neuroscience program from Koc University is to provide students a flexible, nourished and competitive research environment so as to be one of the top leading and internationally respected neuroscience PHD programs on the world, to produce pioneer work and to train our students as leaders both in teaching and research. 

Students from different backgrounds are encouraged to apply for the program and each year, successful applicants with strong achievements are accepted after a rigourous interview. 

The University aims to train the students with a strong general background in neuroscience and to lead them to specialize in a specific core area. For this aim, students are expected to take core and advanced neuroscience courses in addition to related courses of other graduate programs.

Being a part of ongoing research and an active member of laboratory staff is expected from the first day of admission to the program. The faculty members support any collaboration and interact closely with other faculty members and students to create a multi-disciplinary impact.  Many of the courses are given as coordinated-teaching by different faculty members.

Research areas

Current research ranges from molecular mechanisms of central nervous system tumors, the molecular mechanisms of reprogramming and identifying genes that are important for iPS cell generation, epigenetics, protein-protein interactions and protein structure-function dynamics, targeted drug delivery, the synaptic inputs from receptors to motor neurons that innervate human muscles, cognitive models of memory, decision making and comprehension, modeling neuronal circuits, signal transduction in neural systems and the neurobiology of psychiatric and neurological disorders.