Notices of Funding Opportunities

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 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 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 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.

Reissue of:RFA-NS-18-029 and RFA-NS-20-029. This funding opportunity announcement (FOA) is designed to support teams of investigators that seek to cross boundaries of interdisciplinary collaboration to elucidate the contributions of dynamic circuit activity to a specific behavioral or neural system. Applications are encouraged to propose adventurous and challenging goals that can only be tackled by a synergistic team-based approach and have the potential to be transformative and/or to enable significant advances. These studies at the exploratory stage are intended for the development of experimental capabilities and/or theoretical frameworks in preparation for a future competition for larger-scale or extended efforts, including the BRAIN TargetedBCP R01 or the multi-component, Team-Research BRAIN Circuit Programs (U19).The overall goal of this FOA is to enable a large-scale analysis of neural systems and circuits within the context and during the simultaneous measurement of an ethologically relevant behavior. Toward this end, teams are expected to assemble and leverage multi-disciplinary expertise, and to integrate experimental with computational and theoretical approaches. Teams are expected to bridge fields by incorporating rich information on cell-types, on circuit functionality and connectivity, in conjunction with sophisticated analyses of an ethologically relevant behavior of an organism or a well-defined neural system. Teams are also expected to aim for a mechanistic understanding of the circuits of the central nervous system (CNS) by applying cutting-edge methods such as those for large-scale recording, manipulation, and analysis of neural circuits across multiple regions of the CNS.

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) supports Comprehensive Centers to develop and test technologies that can be scaled to brain-wide atlases of mouse circuit connectivity. Centers will establish data collection, analysis, and dissemination pipelines to demonstrate the feasibility of mapping cell-to-cell connectivity with a minimum resolution of synaptic connections. They will demonstrate the significance of the approach within the context of a chosen CNS sub-volume, by testing specific hypotheses relating circuit structure to function. They will also incorporate toolsets and infrastructure for integrating separately collected data from smaller volumes, as well as from other data collection modalities, and for enabling the neuroscience community to interact with and mine the data for new research questions. Centers will be integrated into the BRAIN CONNECTS Network, consisting of projects from this FOA and its companion announcements, as a coordinated effort aimed at developing wiring diagrams that can span entire brains across multiple scales.

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) supports Specialized Projects to develop current or emerging technologies to generate comprehensive atlases of brain connectivity, with an emphasis on human, non-human primate (NHP), and mouse. Projects validating approaches using other species are also permitted if well justified. Applications may address any aspects of the data collection, analysis, and dissemination pipelines, to enable faster and more cost-effective generation and interpretation of brain-wide wiring diagrams. Projects will offer distinct capabilities and competencies aimed at developing and optimizing current technologies or entirely new and potentially risky approaches. They will be integrated into the BRAIN CONNECTS Network, consisting of other Specialized Projects from this FOA, and Comprehensive Centers from its companion announcements, as a coordinated effort aimed at developing wiring diagrams that can span entire brains across multiple scales.

This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) supports Comprehensive Centers to develop and test technologies that can be scaled to brain-wide atlases of human and non-human primate circuit connectivity. Centers will establish data collection, analysis, and dissemination pipelines to demonstrate the feasibility of mapping region-to-region connectivity with a minimum resolution of individual cells and/or axon fibers. They will demonstrate the significance of the approach within the context of a chosen CNS sub-volume, by testing specific hypotheses relating circuit structure to function. They will also incorporate toolsets and infrastructure for integrating separately collected data from smaller volumes, as well as from other data collection modalities, and for enabling the neuroscience community to interact with and mine the data for new research questions. Centers will be integrated into the BRAIN CONNECTS Network, consisting of projects from this FOA and its companion announcements, as a coordinated effort aimed at developing wiring diagrams that can span entire brains across multiple scales.

(Reissue of RFA-NS-18-030) This FOA solicits applications for research projects that use innovative, methodologically-integrated approaches to understand how circuit activity gives rise to mental experience and behavior. The goal is to support projects that can realize a meaningful outcome within 5 years. Applications should address circuit function in the context of specific neural systems such as sensation, perception, attention, reasoning, intention, decision-making, emotion, navigation, communication or homeostasis. Projects should link theory and data analysis to experimental design and should produce predictive models as deliverables. Projects should aim to improve the understanding of circuits of the central nervous system by systematically controlling stimuli and/or behavior while actively recording and/or manipulating dynamic patterns of neural activity. Projects can use non-human and human species, and applications should explain how the selected species offers ideal conditions for revealing general principles about the circuit basis of a specific behavior.