BRIDGE · Brain & BehaviouR InterDisciplinary rEsearch

This programme aims at enabling a new generation of researchers to tackle frontiers issues about the brain and mind in a multi-disciplinary and multi-methodological fashion. Neuroscience has made many recent advances to connect mental and social phenomena with brain processes. But social sciences and humanities have also made a major progress in understanding human behaviours, and it is urgent to train fellows to better integrate knowledge and technical skills from various traditional disciplines.A rare opportunity to educate young scientists to make novel bridges between brain and behavioural sciences is offered by the creation of the Brain & Behaviour Laboratory (BBL) at UNIGE. The BBL does not only have cutting-edge research facilities (from MRI, EEG, and TMS to virtual reality and multimodal social observation labs) – but it constitutes a unique structure since it is jointly coordinated by two multi-disciplinary institutions: the Interfaculty Neuroscience Centre (CIN) regrouping neurologists, biologists, cognitive psychologists, and computational scientists; and the Interfaculty Centre for Affective Sciences (CISA) gathering psychologists, philosophers, economists, sociologists, lawyers, and art experts – who all study emotional and motivational behaviours in individual and societal contexts. These two centres have launched an innovative and dynamic collaboration in the BBL that now allows many catalytic interactions and bridges between different approaches and levels of analysis among scientists from various disciplines.BRIDGE will train incoming fellows to master the scientific approaches and techniques developed in the BBL, while it will also support outgoing fellows to acquire knowledge, skills, or data that are not currently present in the BBL, and encourage them to return afterwards with reintegrating fellowship. BRIDGE will also set up a new education program completing at a common postdoctoral level the existing doctoral schools of CIN and CISA.