DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This is a revised application for a jointly sponsored Ruth L. Kirchstein Institutional Predoctoral Training Program grant from 40 neuroscientists across 11 academic departments at the University of California, Davis. The goal of the program is to provide a broad training in the fundamental principles of neuroscience for entering students that will lay solid foundations for their specialized research in advanced years and provide them with the broad perspective essential for their establishing successful independent research programs in neuroscience in their future careers. The program will operate under the auspices of the existing interdepartmental graduate program in neuroscience at UC Davis which offers the scope and flexibility needed to meet our training objectives. The Training Program requests support for 6 predoctoral trainees to be selected annually by an Advisory Committee. Trainees will receive one year of support from the grant, typically in their first year. Internal support mechanisms and other extramural grants, that will be meshed with this program, will be used for support of the remaining -3-4 years of advanced training. Trainees will participate in a teaching program especially designed to give exposure to as broad a range of modern neuroscience subdisciplines and technologies as possible including cellular and molecular neuroscinece, neuroanatomy and neurophysiology, neurogenetics, systems neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, computational neuronscience and modeling, the neurobiology of disease, and central neural mechanisms of behavior. Trainees will receive a rigorous basic training through formal course work, seminars and laboratory rotations and will participate in colloquia in which they will be expected regularly to make oral presentations. Students will thus be well-prepared for their dissertation research and for future, independent careers in basic and disease-related neuroscience research.