Notices of Funding Opportunities

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) intends to support a group of Specialized Collaboratories that will adopt scalable technology platforms and streamlined sampling strategies and assay cascade to create comprehensive and highly granular brain cell atlases in human, non-human primates, and mouse, in coordination and collaboration with other BICAN projects. In particular, the Specialized Collaboratories are expected to complement the Comprehensive Centers in BICAN with distinct capabilities, competencies, and research aims. The overarching goal of the BICAN is to build reference brain cell atlases that will be widely used throughout the research community, providing a molecular and anatomical foundational framework for the study of brain function and disorders.

The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative is aimed at revolutionizing neuroscience through development and application of innovative technologies to map neural circuits, monitor and modulate their activity, and understand how they contribute to thoughts, sensations, emotions, and behaviors. NIH has issued a variety of Funding Opportunity Announcements (FOAs) that will support projects that apply technologies to understand neural circuit function in the context of specific circuits, resulting in a diverse portfolio of research into the fundamental biology of nervous system function.

This FOA solicits the development of theories, computational models, and analytical tools to derive understanding of brain function from complex neuroscience data. Proposed projects could develop tools to integrate existing theories or formulate new theories; conceptual frameworks to organize or fuse data to infer general principles of brain function; multiscale/multiphysics models to generate new testable hypotheses to design/drive future experiments; new analytical methods to either support or refute a stated hypothesis about brain function. It is expected that the tools developed under this FOA will be made widely available to the neuroscience research community for their use and modification. Investigative studies should be limited to model parameter estimation and/or validity testing of the tools being developed.

This BRAIN Initiative FOA is to further develop molecular tools of high impact that are targetable to brain cell types for the monitoring and manipulation of neural circuits in experimental animals. This FOA is part of the BRAIN Initiative Armamentarium for Brain Cell Access transformative project. This will support iterative improvement of molecular payloads capable of monitoring and manipulating neural cell activity and that can be delivered to specific brain cell types using targeting technologies.

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) supports the development and validation of next-generation tools, methods, and analytic approaches to precisely quantify behaviors and combine them with simultaneous recordings of brain activity in humans. Tools used for measuring and analyzing behavior should be multi-modal, with the appropriate accuracy, specificity, temporal resolution, and flexibility necessary for integration with existing tools used to measure and modulate the brain circuits that give rise to those behaviors.

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) solicits applications for team-centric development and validation of innovative non-invasive imaging technologies that could have a transformative impact on the study of brain function/connectivity. Applications are expected to turn a novel concept into a functional prototype using this phased grant mechanism. The feasibility should be established by the end of its first phase and serve as a foundation for the transition to its second phase. Fully developing the technology into a functional prototype and validating it by in-vivo animal or human function/connectivity imaging are anticipated in the second phase. The research plan should provide a realistic timeline and tangible milestones to support the proposed development effort. Awards will be integrated into the BRAIN Non-Invasive Imaging Consortium, as a coordinated network on brain function/connectivity imaging.

This FOA will support integrated, interdisciplinary research teams that focus on examining dynamic circuit functions related to behavior, using advanced and innovative technologies. The FOA will support programs with a necessarily-synergistic, team science approach. Awards will be made for 5 years, with a possibility of one competing renewal. Applications should incorporate overarching principles of circuit function in the context of specific neural systems underlying sensation, perception, emotion, motivation, cognition, decision-making, motor control, communication, or homeostasis. Applications should incorporate theory-/model-driven experimental design and should offer predictive models as deliverables. Applications should seek to understand circuits of the central nervous system by systematically controlling stimuli and/or behavior while actively recording and/or manipulating relevant dynamic patterns of neural activity and by measuring the resulting behaviors and/or perceptions. Applications are expected to employ approaches guided by specified theoretical constructs, and are encouraged to employ quantitative, mechanistic models where appropriate. Applications will be required to manage their data and analysis methods in a framework that will be developed and used in the proposed U19 project and exchanged with other BRAIN U19 awardees for further refinement and development. Model systems, including the possibility of multiple species ranging from invertebrates to humans, can be employed and should be appropriately justified. Programs should employ multi-component teams of research expertise including neurobiologists, statisticians, physicists, mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, and data scientists, as appropriate - that seek to cross boundaries of interdisciplinary collaboration. Applicants proposing to include human subjects with invasive neural recording must apply to the companion FOA, RFA-NS-XX-XXX.

This FOA will support integrated, interdisciplinary research teams from prior BRAIN technology and/or integrated approaches teams, and/or new projects from the research community that focus on examining circuit functions related to behavior, using advanced and innovative technologies. The goal will be to support programs with a team science approach that can realize meaningful outcomes within 5-plus years. Awards will be made for 5 years, with a possibility of one competing renewal. Applications should address overarching principles of circuit function in the context of specific neural systems underlying sensation, perception, emotion, motivation, cognition, decision-making, motor control, communication, or homeostasis. Applications should incorporate theory-/model-driven experimental design and should offer predictive models as deliverables. Applications should seek to understand circuits of the central nervous system by systematically controlling stimuli and/or behavior while actively recording and/or manipulating relevant dynamic patterns of neural activity and by measuring the resulting behaviors and/or perceptions. Applications are expected to employ approaches guided by specified theoretical constructs, and are encouraged to employ quantitative, mechanistic models where appropriate. Applications will be required to manage their data and analysis methods in a prototype framework that will be developed and used in the proposed U19 project and exchanged with other U19 awardees for further refinement and development. Model systems, including the possibility of multiple species ranging from invertebrates to humans, can be employed and should be appropriately justified. Budgets should be commensurate with multi-component teams of research expertise including neurobiologists, statisticians, physicists, mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, and data scientists, as appropriate - that seek to cross boundaries of interdisciplinary collaboration.

This FOA will support integrated, interdisciplinary research teams that focus on examining dynamic circuit functions related to behavior, using advanced and innovative technologies. The FOA will support programs with a necessarily-synergistic, team science approach. Awards will be made for 5 years, with a possibility of one competing renewal. Applications should focus on overarching principles of circuit function in the context of specific neural systems underlying sensation, perception, emotion, motivation, cognition, decision-making, motor control, communication, or homeostasis. Applications should aim to understand these circuits of the central nervous system by systematically controlling stimuli and/or behavior while actively recording and/or manipulating relevant dynamic patterns of neural activity and by measuring the resulting behaviors and/or perceptions. Applications are expected to employ approaches and experimental design guided by specified theoretical constructs, are encouraged to employ quantitative, mechanistic and predictive models where appropriate. Model systems, including the possibility of multiple species ranging from invertebrates to humans, can be employed and should be appropriately justified. Programs should employ multi-component teams of research expertise including neurobiologists, statisticians, physicists, mathematicians, engineers, computer scientists, and data scientists, as appropriate - that seek to cross boundaries of interdisciplinary collaboration. Applications will be required to manage their data and analysis methods in a framework that will be developed and used in the proposed U19 project and exchanged with other BRAIN U19 awardees for further refinement and development.

This is a reissue of RFA-MH-21-135. This FOA supports the development of software to visualize and analyze the data as part of programs of building the informatics infrastructure for the BRAIN Initiative. Other informatics programs include developing data standards that are needed to describe the new experiments that are being created by or used in the BRAIN Initiative ( RFA-MH-19-146 ), and creating the data infrastructures that will house the data from multiple experimental groups ( RFA-MH-19-145 ). Each of the programs is aimed at building an infrastructure that is used by a particular sub-domain of experimentalists rather than building a single all-encompassing informatics infrastructure now. Building the infrastructure one experimental area at a time will ensure that the infrastructure is immediately useful to components of the research community. As our understanding of the brain improves, it may be possible to create linkages between these various sub-domain specific informatics programs. Investigators of the informatics programs should keep that goal in mind and build for the future even though the current efforts are more limited in scope.