Research opportunities
Undergraduate research in neuroscience
Neuroscience is spread across the university. A memory lab might sit in psychology, a lab recording from single neurons in physiology, a brain-computer interface group in engineering, and a group modelling neural circuits in computer science. Search all of them, and choose a lab by its question and methods rather than its department.
- Where labs sit
- Psychology, biology, medicine, engineering, CS
- Four broad levels
- Cognitive, systems, cellular, computational
- Before animal work
- Your institution's animal care training
- Skills to mention
- Python or MATLAB, statistics, lab techniques
What neuroscience research looks like as an undergrad
Undergraduates usually start at the edges of a project: scoring behaviour, staining tissue, cleaning recordings or writing analysis scripts. The details depend on the level the lab studies:
- Cognitive: perception, memory and decisions in people, using EEG, fMRI or eye tracking. As in a psychology lab, you run participants and preprocess data.
- Systems: how circuits drive behaviour, often in rodents. You train animals, score video and help with recordings.
- Cellular and molecular: neurons and synapses. You culture cells, stain tissue sections and image them.
- Computational: models and large datasets. You write code from the first week.
Where to find neuroscience labs
Many universities have a neuroscience program with a list of affiliated faculty, but those lists are often incomplete. A search that spans departments, like the one in Prof Insider, can surface faculty those lists leave out. Look in:
- Psychology and cognitive science
- Biology, physiology and pharmacology
- Psychiatry, neurology and other medical departments
- Biomedical and electrical engineering
- Computer science and statistics
- Research institutes at affiliated hospitals
Animal, imaging and EEG work
Animal labs work under an approved animal use protocol, and you must finish your institution's animal care training before handling animals. In Canada these programs follow Canadian Council on Animal Care standards; in the US, each institution's IACUC oversees them. Training can take a while to schedule, so start early.
Human imaging and EEG labs need human research ethics training instead. RAs fit EEG caps, run sessions and preprocess recordings, and MRI sessions may run at a hospital outside normal hours.
Skills worth mentioning
Code is useful even in a wet lab, since a script that batch-processes images or plots behaviour saves the lab real time.
- Python with NumPy and pandas, plus MNE-Python for EEG
- MATLAB, still common in electrophysiology and EEG labs
- Statistics, ideally including mixed models
- Bench techniques from lab courses: dissection, staining, microscopy
Example email to a professor
The names and papers are made up. Swap in your own details and a real paper from the professor's page.
Subject: Neuroscience student with EEG experience: your sleep spindle studies
Dear Professor Varga,
Your lab's 2025 paper linking sleep spindles to overnight gains on a finger-tapping task ended by asking whether the effect holds in older adults, and that question is why I'm writing. I'm a third-year neuroscience student at [your university].
For a course project, I analyzed an open EEG dataset in Python with MNE: filtering, removing eye-blink artifacts with ICA, and plotting event-related potentials. The commented code is here: [GitHub link]. I've also completed [your university]'s human research ethics training.
Is there a spot for an undergraduate RA in your lab next term? I could start by preprocessing recordings or helping set up overnight sessions, and I can take Tuesday and Thursday evenings plus two overnight sessions a month.
Best regards, Hannah Cho BSc Neuroscience, Year 3
Common questions
Do I need to know how to code for neuroscience research?
Not for every lab, but it helps in almost all of them. Wet-lab and animal labs will train you in bench and behavioural techniques, while computational, imaging and EEG labs usually expect some Python or MATLAB from the start.
Can undergraduates work with animals in a neuroscience lab?
Yes, once trained. You will usually need to be added to the lab's animal protocol and finish your institution's animal care courses first. Many undergraduates begin with behavioural scoring or tissue processing.
Is neuroscience research good preparation for medical school?
It can be. Medical schools generally care more about sustained involvement than about which field it is in, and labs at hospital research institutes also put you near clinical work. See pre-med research.