Big Ideas in Neuroscience

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Cross-disciplinary teams transforming our understanding of the brain

Big Ideas are the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute's flagship research projects. These five-year grants catalyze cross-disciplinary teams of researchers to collaboratively tackle fundamental questions that advance our understanding of the mind, brain and behavior in health and disease.


Our Big Ideas projects include bold projects to advance our understanding of the science of addiction and brain rejuvenation, to design new technologies to interface with the brain, and to build research platforms to connect molecular to systems-level neuroscience and advance the study of human brain organoids and assembloids in the lab.

Closed

Applying for Big Ideas Grants

Big Ideas grant applications are currently closed. Stay tuned for announcements about our next call for letters of intent.

Funded Big Ideas projects

Funded research
Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute
NeuroVision Initiative

The goal is to forge an inter-disciplinary collaboration between physicists, biologists, chemists, and translational medical scientists by inventing new ways of visualizing the brain, from individual molecules to neuronal circuits to entire brain regions, from a normally functioning neuron to a diseased brain.

Funded research
Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute
NeuroPlant Initiative

The NeuroPlant Initiative aims to leverage a botanical armamentarium to manipulate the brain — by building a pipeline to explore chemicals synthesized in plants as potential new treatments for neurological disease and as a window into the chemistry of the brain.

Funded research
Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute
Neuro-Omics Initiative (Phase 2)

Creating new tools to help neuroscientists bridge the study of genes and proteins operating in the brain to the study of brain circuits and systems, which could lead to a deeper understanding of brain function and disease.

Funded research
Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute
Stanford Brain Organogenesis Program (Phase 2)

Developing brain organoids and assembloids – three dimensional brain tissues grown in the lab – to study human brain development, evolution and neuropsychiatric disorders.

Funded research
Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute
Stanford Brain Rejuvenation Project (Phase 2)

The Stanford Brain Rejuvenation Project is an initiative by leading aging researchers, neuroscientists, chemists, and engineers to understand the basis of brain aging and rejuvenation and how they relate to neurodegeneration.

Funded research
Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute
Stroke Collaborative Action Network

Breaches barriers in our understanding of stroke to develop therapies and improve stroke recovery.