NS219: Experimental Design | Fall 2018 | Neuroscience Graduate Program

Course Description: The goal of this course is to cover basic aspects of experimental design in Neuroscience, including stating a hypothesis clearly, identifying groups and outcome measures, planning controls, reducing the contribution of experimental biases, performing power calculations to estimate sample size, and choosing statistical tests. Our hope is that this course will help prepare students for planning their own studies, evaluating the literature, and writing grant proposals. Important principles in experimental design will be illustrated through examples from cellular/molecular, systems, and cognitive Neuroscience, as well as examples from Neuroscience disciplines that employ large datasets and/or employ hypothesis-free methodologies.

The format of the course meetings will be approximately 50% didactic presentation and 50% discussion group. A short assignment, such as reading a journal article and/or bringing in an example from the student’s own research experience, will be required for most sessions. Sessions 4-8 will devote considerable time to reviewing experimental designs from the students’ individual laboratory work, and trying to optimize the design, planning, execution, and analysis of the data. A "final project" will be a short write-up of the design of one of the student's own planned studies, including addressing the above factors in experimental design.

Directors: Alexandra Nelson and Stephan Sanders

Time: 2:00-4:00pm unless otherwise noted