About INSPIRE

INSPIRE is a brand-new PhD-granting program at Wayne State University that will launch Fall 2025. We expect to open our first admissions cycle early 2025, and to welcome our first cohort of PhD students in August 2025. 

INSPIRE is the third PhD-granting neuroscience program at WSU, joining Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Program (BCN) and the Translational Neuroscience Program (TNP). Please navigate to the “Neuroscience Programs at WSU” menu item to find compare the three programs and to decide which one you would like to apply to. 

INSPIRE is an interdisciplinary graduate that spans multiple colleges/schools at WSU, including College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, College of Engineering, Eugene Applebaum College of Pharmacy, College of Nursing, College of Education, and School of Medicine. Supported by participation of nearly 70 different faculty from these six different schools and colleges, this PhD-granting program intends to provide students maximum flexibility in their course selection to facilitate their development into the next generation of cutting-edge neuroscientists.  

INSPIRE builds upon WSU’s successful recruitment and retention of internationally recognized, highly-trained scientists with a range of specialties within the field of neuroscience; NIH's Team Science support mechanisms; and well-mapped Detroit demographics that are catalysts for developing highly competitive programs. 

The goal of the INSPIRE program is to prepare the neuroscientist of the future – the neuroscientist who has both a firm understanding of general neural sciences and a particular specialty in research, development and teaching of a key area of neuroscience, as outlined in our major concentrations.  

The future neuroscientist is one who understands not only where the field is going, but also how to navigate the field, including possession of a clear idea of their next professional step well before the time has come to graduate, knowledge of how to bring together interdisciplinary scientists to work as a collective and complementary team, and the confidence and skill to pursue the most recent, cutting-edge techniques toward answering tough questions. The future neuroscientist skillfully navigates academia, industry, and government with equal aplomb. Our curriculum will provide all of these tools to our trainees. 

This new program is structured to expose students to ideas from a wide range of neuroscience disciplines in a manner that cannot be achieved by existing programs with a narrower focus. Additionally, interactions of students and faculty from divergent neuroscience sub-disciplines will enhance students’ abilities to communicate and work with scientists outside the narrow focus of their own research projects. 

The Integrative Neuroscience Program will offer: 

Broad research opportunities with key strength in areas including: 

• Anatomical Neuroscience 
• Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience 
• Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience  
• Endocrinological Neuroscience 
• Epidemiological Neuroscience 
• Engineering Neuroscience 
• Age-related Neurodegeneration 
• Pharmacological Neuroscience 
• Toxicological Neuroscience 
• Model systems: mouse, fly, worm, zebrafish 
• Human-based studies  
• Nearly 60* faculty members from six colleges among whom to choose mentors and co-mentors. *Note that faculty were surveyed for interest in Fall, 2022 and the actual number may now be higher. 

Flexible curriculum 

• The curriculum is designed to bring everyone up to speed in general neuroscience in the first year, and then allows students to choose among many different neuroscience-related courses for each of the major concentrations in the program. 

A range of primary areas of research

• Behavioral Neuroscience 
  • Including: physiological, genetic and developmental mechanisms of behavior 
• Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience  
  • Including: anatomical, behavioral, cellular, developmental, environmental, molecular, pharmacological and toxicological neuroscience 
• Cognitive Neuroscience 
  • Including: cognitive and neural basis of perception, visual cognition, selective attention, working memory, long-term memory, executive control, action, language processing, brain plasticity and ‘cognition across the lifespan’ neuroscience 
• Computational Neuroscience 
  • Including: artificial intelligence, systems and computational neuroscience 
• Sensorimotor Neuroscience  
  • Including: motor control, motor learning, exercise, neurorehabilitation and the neural control of movement across the lifespan; as well as internal and external signal transduction, encoding and perception across the lifespan 

For more information, please contact the INSPIRE program administrators at INSPIRE@wayne.edu.