We are at a watershed period of intellectual history that is producing emerging disciplines, such as neuroeconomics, empirical ethics, and social neuroscience. These new disciplines are rapidly uncovering unifying principles ranging across such diverse phenomena as how small groups of neurons ‘decide’ whether or not to integrate cross-modal sensory information to how people evaluate risky choices, recognize emotions in human faces, choose political candidates, and interact in groups to solve social coordination problems on the basis of such factors as trust and ethical rules. Such unifying principles are the result of highly interdisciplinary research methodologies that integrate neural, psychological, and economic approaches to valuation, human decision making, and social exchange.

BMS was created to provide innovative training opportunities that cut across traditional neurobiological and social science disciplines. To be equally at home with formal models of decision making and social exchange as well as neural and psychological laboratory methods, BMS training balances rigorous coursework on analytic foundations with immersion in experimental methods through laboratory research. Thus, students take a rigorously designed, largely team-taught course sequence that is complemented by an equal balance of cross-disciplinary laboratory research.