Bold new brain research in neuroengineering, brain-inspired design, and individuality
Bold new brain research in neuroengineering, brain-inspired design, and individuality
- November 12, 2015
- NSF awards $13.1 million for 16 new studies, including a UCI-Ohio State project aimed at understanding individual differences in cognitive performance
How does sleep affect individual memories? How do brain cells connect to form meaningful
networks? How is a word like "chair" conceptualized in the mind?
To support potentially transformative research in neural and cognitive systems, the
National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded 16 grants to multidisciplinary teams
from across the United States.
Each award brings together scientists and engineers from diverse fields to investigate
brain-related mysteries.
The awards fall within two themes: neuroengineering and brain-inspired concepts and
designs, and individuality and variation. Each provides up to $1 million over two
to four years.
"These new projects will explore big, exciting ideas in neuroscience to push hard against the boundaries
of what we know," said Betty Tuller, NSF program director in the Social, Behavioral
and Economic Sciences Directorate, who will help oversee the awards.
Understanding the brain
The awards stem from the cross-disciplinary NSF Integrative Strategies for Understanding
Neural and Cognitive Systems program, which supports innovative, integrative, boundary-crossing
approaches necessary to advance brain science. They are the result of the program’s
first solicitation for research proposals, released in fall 2014.
"These teams are building on creative ideas from within and beyond neuroscience,"
said Kenneth Whang, NSF program director in the Computer & Information Science & Engineering
Directorate, which co-funds the awards. "We're seeing some dynamic new research collaborations
that will have huge impacts on fundamental questions, and on what we can discover
or invent in the future."
The NSF directorates for Engineering and for Education and Human Resources also support
the awards. NSF will announce new research themes soon, along with a call for new
proposals.
These new awards will contribute to NSF’s significant investments in support of the
BRAIN Initiative, a coordinated research effort that seeks to accelerate the development
of new neurotechnologies that promise to help researchers answer fundamental questions
about how the brain works.
Among the 16 awarded proposals is one co-led by Zhong-Lin Lu of Ohio State University and Mark Steyvers of the University
of California, Irvine. Using joint hierarchical Bayesian modeling of behavioral and
neuroimaging data, they aim to gain a better neural-understanding of individual differences
in cognitive performance. There work is detailed online with $301,365 in funding that started in August and will run through July 2018.
-from the National Science Foundation
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