The concentration began in November 2015 and we intend to begin greatly enhanced activities for faculty and graduate students interested in the cognitive and brain sciences that will go beyond the individual graduate programs and will bring cognitive scientists together across our campuses. These will include a weekly research lunch for all faculty and students in the field; a distinguished speaker series with lectures once a month that are of broad interdisciplinary interest (some contributed by the participating departments and some funded by the concentration); workshops and tutorials in interdisciplinary fields of special interest (e.g. corpus analyses, computational modeling, fMRI techniques); and shared resources available to students and faculty who wish to begin work using techniques not available within their departments (research rooms outfitted for human subjects, eye trackers, NIRS, speech analysis and synthesis). The aim of these activities will be to strengthen connections among faculty and students across this interdisciplinary span, taking advantage of the close proximity among our departments and schools and building research interactions among faculty with overlapping interests but different disciplinary approaches.
There will be a Visiting Scholars Center, which will host guest speakers and faculty visiting from other institutions for sabbatical terms and for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows from other universities wanting to work collaboratively with Georgetown faculty. Washington DC (and Georgetown in particular), with its attractive and vibrant intellectual community, is an ideal location for such a Center and will bring distinguished visitors and workshops to our concentration.