The Center for Investigating Healthy Minds

Graduate training

So you want to apply to graduate school and work in the Davidson lab? Things you should know:
If you are reading this, you likely have some interest in our work. We appreciate the interest and hope that more students get seriously involved in this kind of work since there are so many wonderful outstanding questions remaining to be studied and understood.

Our lab relies on very sophisticated neuroimaging and other related biological methods to make inferences about processes in the brain and body during emotion, in psychopathology and in response to interventions designed to change emotion and cognition, including meditation. These methods require a lot of technical background to master. Among the most important skills that are required are programming, and statistical and quantitative skills. In addition, significant course work in computer science, biology (neuroscience) and physics are extremely important and very highly recommended. It is not at all necessary that incoming students be Psychology majors. In fact, some of our most successful students have been Physics, Computer Science and Neuroscience majors as undergraduates.

In addition, it is enormously helpful to have significant research experience before applying to graduate school. This typically means spending several years post college in a laboratory as a research assistant. Dr Davidson almost never accepts a student directly from college. Virtually every one of the students in our lab has spent some time (often a lot of time) following college working in a laboratory setting.

Dr Davidson is happy to answer whatever additional questions you might have. Please email his assistant, But if you wish to be seriously considered for a position in our lab, it is imperative that you have the kind of hard science, quantitative and programming background described above.

Volunteer opportunites

None at this time, please check back later.