It all began in the 'past century'...

It was in 1999, when the first international neuroscience graduate program was launched at the University of Tübingen – the Graduate School of Neural & Behavioural Sciences.  Back then, it was the first English-taught neuroscience program at a German university. The research orientation of the training and the combination of basic science and clinical research were features that attracted young graduates and, thus, the graduate school quickly became a well-known training site for German and international students interested in neurosciences.

Concurrent with the University’s successful application for a Cluster of Excellence in integrative neuroscience and the establishment of the Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience (CIN) in 2007, this endeavor developed into the Graduate Training Centre of Neuroscience. Nowadays it offers three masters programs and a doctoral program with currently some 90 masters and more than 240 doctoral student, 50% of which are international students. The chronology in brief:

1999 – Start of the Graduate School of Neural & Behavioural Sciences

2001 – Start of the doctoral program in conjunction with the International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS for Neural & Behavioural Sciences)

2007 – Establishment of the Graduate Training Centre of Neuroscience in conjunction with the setting up of the CIN. From here on out, the GTC serves as a super-ordinate organizational unit that coordinates and runs the masters and doctoral degree programs, including the IMPRS

2008 – Start of the Graduate School of Cellular & Molecular Neuroscience

2011 – Start of the Graduate School of Neural Information Processing

2013 – Funding of a new IMPRS with an expanded scientific focus – the IMPRS for Cognitive & Systems Neuroscience

2014 – Evaluation and accreditation of the masters programs

2018 - Evaluation and accreditation of the three masters programs until 2023 (Neural & Behavioural Science, Cellular & Molecular Science, Neural Information Processing)


Over the past 20 years, the curricula of the graduate programs have experienced a continuous development and underwent several rigorous evaluations and accreditations.  This not only strengthened the research orientation of the training but also resulted in complementary training programs that cover a wide spectrum of modern neuroscience topics, extending from genes & molecules to behavior & cognition and up to the level of computational approaches and state-of-the-art neuroscientific methods.