Doctoral Training Centres - University of Edinburgh

A honeybee’s brain, smaller than a grain of rice, can navigate complex landscapes and learn from experience—tasks that still defeat the world’s most powerful supercomputers. This Doctoral Training Programme in neuroinformatics trains researchers to bridge neuroscience and computer science, exploiting the synergies between how brains process information and how machines do. The problem is that despite rapid advances in both fields, our understanding of the brain—the most sophisticated information-processing device known—remains shallow, while our best computers cannot match biological systems at real-world tasks. The programme has three themes: computational and cognitive neuroscience, neuromorphic and neural engineering, and the software tools needed to advance both. If successful, it could lead to more efficient computing architectures inspired by neural circuits, better artificial intelligence that learns like a brain, and new medical diagnostics for neurological disorders. This is primarily a skills-development and fundamental science initiative—it does not promise a specific product or cure. But similar interdisciplinary training in the past has seeded entire fields, from machine learning to brain-computer interfaces, that now quietly underpin everything from smartphone speech recognition to medical imaging.