Innovative Neurotechnologies and Strategies from the BRAIN Initiative

In 2013, President Obama announced the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, an ambitious research effort to advance understanding of the brain and discover ways to treat and prevent brain disorders using new tools and technologies. With a range of public and private partners, BRAIN also catalyzed further engagement of physicists, engineers, chemists, and computer scientists in the field of neuroscience. Now in its fourth year, the BRAIN Initiative has produced a wealth of new technologies and insights, revealing a greater diversity of brain cell types than was previously known and generating more complex maps of neural circuitry. This session features BRAIN-funded researchers from a range of academic disciplines, who are developing new ways to visualize and manipulate the activity of key brain circuits. The approaches they present, combined with insights from the first phase of BRAIN, have long-term implications for our understanding of the brain’s intricacy and how we might develop new approaches to understanding and treating brain diseases and disorders that affect millions worldwide.