Stanford Neurosciences Institute Faculty awarded BRAIN Initiative grants.

By Nathan Collins

Stanford researchers will be digging further into the inner workings of our brains and the tools to do so, thanks to the latest round of grants from the National Institutes of Health’s

Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, announced in late October. The NIH made 110 grants totaling $169 million, of which about $17 million went to 15 Stanford teams working on advanced brain imaging, understanding neural circuits, and neuromodulation, a set of promising techniques to treat mental illness and other diseases, among other projects:

Noninvasive neuromodulation via focused ultrasonic drug uncaging

Raag Airan

MR-guided focused ultrasound neuromodulation of deep brain structures

Kim Butts-Pauly

A new strategy for cell-type specific gene disruption in flies and mice

Thomas Clandinin and Nirao Shah

Defining cell type specific contributions to fMRI signals

Jin Hyung Lee

Technologies to drastically boost photon sensitivity for brain-dedicated PET

Craig Levin

Bringing laser focus to voltage imaging: Enhanced indicators and advanced scanning methods for two-photon recording of dense networks in vivo

Michael Lin and Stephane Dieudonna

Revealing circuit control of neuronal excitation with next-generation voltage indicators

Michael Lin and Thomas Clandinin

Self-motile electrodes for three dimensional, non-perturbative recording and stimulation

Nick Melosh

BIDS-Derivatives: A data standard for derived data and models in the BRAIN Initiative

Russell Poldrack

Enabling ethical participation in innovative neuroscience on mental illness and addiction: towards a new screening tool enhancing informed consent for transformative research on the human brain

Laura Roberts

Accessing the neuronal scale: Designing the next generation of compact ultra high field MRI technology for order-of-magnitude sensitivity increase in non-invasive human brain mapping

Brian Rutt

Ensemble neural dynamics in the medial prefrontal cortex underlying cognitive flexibility and reinforcement learning

Mark Schnitzer and Surya Ganguli

Protein voltage sensors: Kilohertz imaging of neural dynamics in behaving animals

Mark Schnitzer and Michael Lin

Towards a complete description of the circuitry underlying sharp wave-mediated memory replay

Ivan Soltesz, Gyorgy Buzsaki, John Lisman and Attila Losonczy

Novel Bayesian linear dynamical systems-based methods for discovering human brain circuit dynamics in health and disease

Vinod Menon