Neuroscience has strong and long-lasting traditions in Aarhus. A key motivation to join the subject-specific PhD program within Neuroscience is to take active part in the scientific community among graduate neuroscience students in Aarhus. Already representing a very high standard, the vision is to further improve and stimulate the neuroscience training environment, aiming at the highest international level.
This new neuroscience program will increase the sense of belonging to a strong graduate neuroscience society, as established with success at other high-ranking universities.
Graduate students within neuroscience at Health in Aarhus are encouraged to sign up for this program to participate in a portfolio of exciting activities, to strengthen their neuroscience profile and to document their expertise with a PhD degree in Neuroscience.
Below you can read about the compulsory activities in the neuroscience programme.
Please contact the heads of the subject-specific programme for questions about the activities.
Please note, PhD courses offered in 2025 can be found in PhD Course Management from October 2024.
This course is a development of the Graduate Neuroscience Course which has been running in Aarhus for a decade. Now it is shaped to fit into the new structure of graduate activities, both at the local but also at the national level.
Content of the course will cover a broad range of neuroscience topics and be defined based on research areas with strong expertise and of specific high focus in Aarhus. A second aim of the course is to facilitate further collaborations and enhance insight into local neuroscience expertise in Aarhus by stimulating interactions among the participants and lecturers. Moreover, the faculty of such course will include selected external experts in the field. Their visit and interaction with the local Aarhus University (AU) research community will also ignite collaborations and knowledge exchange that will benefit the Neuroscience community at AU.
Course materials will be a combination of original articles and reviews supported by the textbook Purves Neuroscience. This enables each participant to personalise the preparation for the individual sessions, depending on their educational background. Overall, this ensures that every participant develops and strengthens their knowledge within the broader neuroscience field.
The format consists of two weeks with three days of teaching each week. A total of six course days. The course is based on classroom teaching with a few online elements. There will be no laboratory/wet activities during the course. There is no exam.
The annual meeting for the Neuroscience programme is a chance for all enrolled students as well as supervisors and other interested parties to meet and discuss. The programme will include short oral presentations from students who have been enrolled for more than one year. One or two (local) neuroscientist(s) will also be invited to give an inspirational lecture.
All PhD students enrolled in the programme will bring a recent poster for presentation. The annual meeting will include light refreshments and consist of activities lasting a total of about half a day.
Each year, an internationally recognised neuroscientist will be invited to give a guest lecture. The lecture will start with a short 10-minute presentation “Behind the scientist”, where the speaker will talk about his/her career path and background.
“Meet-the-speaker” lunch in relation to the lecture is organised for the speaker and PhD students enrolled in the programme.
In 2025, the international guest speaker will be Professor Johan Jakobsson, Lund University, presenting a lecture with the title: “Transposable elements and human brain disorders”.
An overview of available journal clubs at Health can be found in the datebase.
Below are listed some relevant neuroscience journal clubs as examples; you can find more information about the journal clubs in the database above.
The programme will include peer-to-peer feedback sessions at regular intervals where students present aspects of their project to each other and give feedback. Students enrolled in the programme will be divided into smaller groups, each having a senior researcher connected as facilitator.
Topics for the sessions will include the PhD project itself, but also other aspects such as external research stays, interdisciplinarity, manuscript publication process, thesis writing, translatability, commercialisation, among others.
Sessions will include short presentations related to the topic from invited speakers, to promote the group discussions.
Each peer-to-peer feedback session will typically last half a day and is combined with lunch for the participants.
Participation in compulsary and voluntary activities must be documented by the PhD student in MyPhD.
To obtain a diploma supplement specific for the subject-specific PhD programme, the PhD student must participate in the five compulsory activities:
