Picower and MIT scientists awarded BRAIN Initiative grants

Today, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced the first round of Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative award recipients, including several MIT interdisciplinary teams. The BRAIN Initiative, spearheaded by President Obama in April 2013, challenges the nation's leading scientists to advance our sophisticated understanding of the human mind and discover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure neurological disorders like Alzheimer's, schizophrenia, autism, and traumatic brain injury. "The human brain is one of the most complicated structures in the known universe," said NIH Director Francis Collins. "We have an unprecedented opportunity to develop new technologies that will allow us to map the circuits of the brain, measure activity within those circuits, and understand how their interactions maintain health and modulate human behavior." With the NIH Brain Initiative, the scientific community is charged with accelerating the invention of cutting-edge technologies that can produce dynamic images of complex neural circuits and illuminate the interaction of lightning-fast brain cells.