Interdisciplinary at its core, the Rhodes neuroscience major exists at the intersection of the biology, chemistry, psychology, and philosophy departments to provide students a comprehensive examination of the nervous system. For this reason, it’s always been a popular major choice among students interested in medical and post-graduate health programs.
However, Maanasa Yepuru ’26, a Rhodes senior from Memphis, has taken an innovative step toward a future in neural engineering by combining computer science with neuroscience to craft her own unique interdisciplinary major.
Originally an aspiring neuroscience major on the pre-med track, while enrolled in the Philosophy of the Cognitive Sciences—a neuroscience elective offered by the philosophy department—her mind was opened to a different possibility. The course emphasized similarities in the way a human mind works and the way a computer inputs and processes data. “Machine learning, reinforcement learning, and artificial curiosity are implemented algorithmically in computers, but many of their core ideas were based on how humans adapt and explore,” Yepuru says.
While the brain was an early conceptual template for how the computer was designed, Yepuru adds that computer algorithms also help us understand the brain better. She notes that in another course, Neuroscience of Sleep, students were asked to use computer code to analyze and better understand sleep log data in order to draw conclusions from it.
In learning about this crossover, Yepuru was inspired to bridge two sciences—of the computer and of the mind—to build her own major: a blend of computer science and neuroscience.
“I want to go into neural engineering. Specifically, I’m really interested in brain-computer interfaces, and the idea of making prosthetics and being able to connect them to nerves,” says Yepuru.
When a student designs an interdisciplinary major, they must petition to prove a need. This involves research, an essay, and a proposal to gain the foundational understanding of these subjects and how they interact. Yepuru’s successful application for the interdisciplinary major allowed her to gain experience and credentials in two fields in a targeted fashion. Additionally, her class schedule allowed her to pursue minors in Spanish and linguistics and spend a semester studying in South Korea, taking courses in neuroscience and data structures but also exploring Korean art history.
An advantage of her self-designed interdisciplinary major is that it has equipped her to do research with professors in both neuroscience and computer science. Her work with Dr. Sean Kugele in the computer science department involves using LIDA (Learning Intelligent Distribution Agent) cognitive architecture to study how sensory information is processed in the brain. In the same field, Yepuru’s work with Dr. Addison Schwamb employs electroencephalogram (EEG) data to differentiate between states of consciousness. With Dr. Matt Weeks of the psychology department, she is evaluating the functionality of AI-generated images for psychology experiments.
Adds Yepuru, who will graduate in May, “Rhodes’ unique offering of the self-designed interdisciplinary major afforded me the opportunity to develop interdisciplinary skills that align with neural engineering, where understanding the brain requires both computational tools and biological insight.”
By Simran Kumar ’26