Messages below from NINDS Director’s Messages

BRAIN 2015 profile of Walter Koroshetz, MD

New Award Creates Stable Funding for Outstanding Neuroscience Investigators

Director’s Messages July 16, 2105 by Walter Koroshetz, Director of NINDS and co-Director of the BRAIN Inititative

As NINDS Director, my goal is to optimize the progress of basic, translational, and clinical neuroscience research. One issue that slows the pace of discovery is that, rather than directly engaging in research, many principal investigators spend a great deal of their time writing and administering grant proposals. This is a consequence not only of the current constrained budget climate, but also of the fact that NIH grants fund individual projects that are relatively short in duration.

We feel that it is time to free up smart, talented people with innovative ideas to focus their time and effort on doing excellent science. To empower investigators to use their time more productively, NINDS is piloting a new funding mechanism – the Research Program Award (RPA) (see FAQs). Rather than funding a single project, an RPA will support an NINDS investigator’s overall research program for up to eight years. This initial pilot program aims to fund up to 30 investigators in FY 2016 who have demonstrated strong potential to ...

Tom Insel, while he was Director of NIMH and co-director of the MCWG wrote a number of blog posts that appeared in his blog within the NIMH website.

His BRAIN Initiative related post titles are: ‘The Brain’s Critical Balance’, ‘Early BRAIN Breakthroughs’, ‘BRAIN Awareness’, ‘Creating the Next Generation of Tools’, and ‘New Views into the Brain’.

The Brain’s Critical Balance

Director’s Blog July 29, 2015

We have reached an interesting moment in our quest to understand how the brain works. Our current tools generate an abundance of data, but we are not sure how to turn this data into knowledge. In some ways, neuroscience today is where physics was half a century ago. The physicist Steven Weinberg reminds us, “Rather than being starved for data fifty years ago, we were deluged by data we could not understand. Progress when it came was generally initiated by theoretical advances, with experimentation serving as a referee between competing theories and providing occasional healthy surprises.” While we don’t have a unified field theory of the brain, some of the early projects in the BRAIN Initiative are providing models of how behavior emerges from brain activity.  One of the ...