Its main purpose is to educate world-class doctoral students in the interdisciplinary field of brain and cognitive sciences.

The BCS department was created in 2009 as a part of the government initiative, the World Class University (WCU) project, supported by the College of Natural Sciences and the Seoul National University. The WCU project ended in 2013, and the BCS department has been continuously supported by the government's BK21 program(Brain Korea 21 program for leading universities and students) since 2013. The department has been fastly growing, currently having 9 full-time faculty members and 2 affiliated faculty members in the department, with approximately 70 graduate students and research associates.

The BCS department aims to raise quality researchers in the brain and cognitive sciences. The world trend in neuroscience has shifted to unraveling the mysteries of the neural mechanisms of cognition and mind. Our departmental goals are to raise and nurture high-quality researchers who can play significant roles in carving some original and independent research fields and who can lead the world with such originality. The nature of the brain and cognitive sciences requires putting together different disciplines of sciences and techniques, and, as the first graduate department dedicated to brain and cognitive sciences in Korea, we make hard efforts to raise researchers who can make integrative use of diverse techniques and backgrounds to tackle mind and cognition scientifically. We believe that people who have been educated and trained in our department will significantly advance the brain mechanisms of how the mind works and contribute to the betterment of human society in the future.

Inah Lee, Ph.D. Departmental Chair