which residency works for neuroscience research?

I think people generally get the PhD first. And if you want to do computational/systems/cognitive neuroscience, it would be a PhD, not a fellowship - medical fellowships are generally geared toward diagnosis and/or treatment instead of research.

Since it'll be a PhD, if you're already it medical school it doesn't really matter what specialty you choose because the application process will be totally separate from medicine. I imagine you'd probably be happiest in neurology or psychiatry because then you'd be treating patients and learning about diseases that wreck havoc with the cognitive systems you're studying. At the same time, if your true interest is doing research in the neuroscience fields, medical school may not be the best place for you; you may be much happier in grad school.

I think the question you need to ask yourself is, "Will I be happy going through 8 years doing stuff that has nothing at all to do with what I really want to be doing eventually?"

Neurology and psychiatry don't really have much to do with the neurosciences beyond a fairly shallow introduction into some topics. If you're well versed in neuroscience literature you'll feel as though you stepped in a time machine and shot back into the past - what's taught in medical schools is not always totally up to date and focuses more on what's useful to clinicians than what's interesting from a researcher's point of view.

Remember, when you're learning medicine, you're learning diagnosis and treatment, not so much exploring the cutting edge. Even in research, most MDs pursue clinical research (though of course there are exceptions). In general, medicine tends to be more practical though.

(I was a cognitive science major in college.)

stat3113 said:

If my long-term goal is to do be an MD who does research in systems/computational/cognitive neuroscience, which residency would work with that? I'm thinking psychiatry or neurology? After residency, would I then apply to fellowship (or maybe PhD) programs in neuroscience?

Are fellowship programs restrictive in which residencies they choose from? I.e. could someone coming out of an IM (or General Surgery) residency get into a neuroscience fellowship?

And after the fellowship, I assume I could work out a system where I would research 75% of the time, and 25% clinical stuff, etc.

Is that pretty much how it works?

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See Post #6 in this thread.

Psych can work pretty well for this--you'll find groups in many major academic centers doing this kind of research, often using some kind of functional brain imaging, in psychiatry departments.

The advantage of psych (vs. IM or Neuro) is that the clinical work in academic centers tends to lend itself better to the "part-time practice" model you envision.

If you're not already in med school and you really want to do this with your life, then by all means try to get into an MD/PhD program with a neuroscience PhD option.

Blade28 said:

You might want to consider an MD/PhD program.

Sounds like you're heading towards Neurology...Psychiatry and General Surgery certainly don't have as much relevance!

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I disagree whole-heartedly. Though neurology is historically the specialty that has been concerned with brain-behavior relationships, this is largely due to the fact that neurologists are the ones who have had access to people with focal brain damage who manifested interesting behavioral deficits. Now that the lesion method has largely fallen out of favor due to the emergence of functional brain imaging, neurology no longer has a special relationship to cognitive neuroscience research. Neurology research now is largely concerned with things like inflammation and cell death. It's sort of like internal medicine for the brain. In other words, clinically, it doesn't matter where the lesion is or what interesting behvioral deficit it produces, your neurologist will still give you aspirin and Plavix. Some neurologists will be versed in and even do research on localization of brain function, but (sadly) this is a dying breed. Psychiatry, on the other hand, is all about how the brain gives rise to the mind. Granted, in the past there was relatively little known about the brain bases of mental illnesses, but this is changing very fast. There is an immense quantity of functional brain imaging research going on in psychiatry departments these days, much more than in neurology departments (and the NIH sees this type of research as more relevant to solving problems like drug addiction and schizophrenia than problems like stroke and epilepsy). I agree that general surgery is less relevant, though as a neurosurgeon you can do a lot of very interesting work recording electrical activity in the human brain, but why spend all of that time and effort just to be able to stick some wires into someone's brain. You can just as easily do that as a psychiatrist who collaborates with neurosurgeons - you just can't put the electrodes in yourself. The other great thing about psychiatry is that you actually can have time to do research, since it is one of the less demanding specialties in terms of clinical committments and call. Also, the last year of psychiatry residency is mostly elective, which gives you some time to spen in the lab.

I would definitely consider doing an MD-PhD. Try to find a program that is strong in cognitive neuroscience research. There are many, including WashU, UCLA, UPitt, Iowa, UCSD, Penn, Harvard (MIT). More and more MD-PhDs are heading in this direction - and most of them are going into psychiatry.