The BRAIN Initiative® and the neuroscience field as a whole is generating massive and diverse research data across different modalities, spatiotemporal scales and species in efforts to advance our understanding of the brain. The data types are being produced through development and application of innovative technologies in high-throughput -omics profiling, optical microscopy, electron microscopy, electrophysiological recording, macroscale neuroimaging, neuromodulation, and others. The BRAIN Initiative® has made significant investments in the development of an infrastructure to make data available to the research community in a useful way. This infrastructure includes data archives, data standards, and software for data integration, analysis and machine learning. This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) encourages secondary analysis of the large amounts of existing data related to The BRAIN Initiative®. The data do not need to be held in one of the funded BRAIN Initiative data archives, but the data must be held in a data archive that is readily accessible to the research community. Support will be provided for innovative analysis of relevant existing datasets using conventional or novel analytic methods, data science techniques, and machine learning approaches. Support may also be requested to prepare and submit existing data into any of The BRAIN Initiative® data archives. Investigators should not underestimate the time and effort that may be necessary to curate or harmonize data. Analyzed data, models and analytical tools generated under this FOA are expected to be deposited into an appropriate data archive. Since The BRAIN Initiative® data archives are mostly making the data available to the research community through cloud-based storage, depositing the analyzed data, models and tools are expected to enhance opportunities to create a data sandbox where investigators can easily compare the results of their analysis with those from other research groups.
Notices of Funding Opportunities
National Institutes of Health (NIH) BRAIN Initiative notices of funding opportunities (NOFOs), requests for applications (RFAs), program announcements (PAs), and other NIH Guide announcements are listed below. Search this page to find all notices of special interest (NOSI). Search the Closed Opportunities page to find expired opportunities.
Learn more about NIH’s grant mechanisms.
Learn about the Plan for Enhancing Diverse Perspectives (PEDP), a required component in most BRAIN applications.
Learn about the NIH Data Management and Sharing Policy, which all NIH applications must follow.
To see more NIH-funded awards, please visit NIH Grants and Funding.
For more about NIH BRAIN Initiative research and associated funding opportunities, visit the Research Overview.
The purpose of this Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative is to encourage applications that will develop and validate tools and resources to facilitate the detailed analysis of brain microconnectivity. Novel and augmented techniques are sought that will ultimately be broadly accessible to the neuroscience community for the interrogation of microconnectivity in healthy and diseased brains of model organisms and humans. Development of technologies that will significantly drive down the cost of connectomics would enable routine mapping of the microconnectivity on the same individuals that have been analyzed physiologically, or to compare normal and pathological tissues in substantial numbers of multiple individuals to assess variability. Advancements in both electron microscopy (EM) and super resolution light microscopic approaches are sought. Applications that propose to develop approaches that break through existing technical barriers to substantially improve current capabilities are highly encouraged. Proof-of-principle demonstrations and/or reference datasets enabling future development are welcome, as are improved approaches for automated segmentation and analysis strategies of neuronal structures in EM images.no
This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) intends to support a group of Specialized Collaboratories that will adopt scalable technology platforms and streamlined workflows to accelerate progress towards establishing comprehensive molecular and anatomical reference cell atlases of human brain and/or non-human primate brains. A central goal of this FOA is to build a brain cell census resource that can be widely used throughout the research community.
This funding opportunity announcement (FOA), in support of the NIH Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative, is one of several FOAs aimed at supporting transformative discoveries that will lead to breakthroughs in understanding human brain function. Guided by the long-term scientific plan, BRAIN 2025: A Scientific Vision, this FOA specifically seeks to support efforts addressing core ethical issues associated with research focused on the human brain and resulting from emerging technologies and advancements supported by The BRAIN Initiative®. The hope is that efforts supported under this FOA might be both complementary and integrative with the transformative, breakthrough neuroscience discoveries supported through The BRAIN Initiative®.
This Funding Opportunity Announcement (FOA) intends to accelerate the integration and use of scalable technologies and tools to enhance brain cell census research, including the development of technology platforms and/or resources that will enable a swift and comprehensive survey of brain cell types and circuits. Applications are expected to address limitations and gaps of existing technologies/tools as a benchmark against which the improvements or competitive advantages of the proposed ones will be measured. The improvements include throughput, sensitivity, selectivity, scalability, spatiotemporal resolution and reproducibility in cell census analyses. The projects funded under this FOA will align with the overarching goals of The BRAIN Initiative® Cell Census Network (BICCN) and are expected to enable the generation of a substantial amount of cell census data using the proposed technologies or via collaboration with the BICCN.
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.
The purpose of this Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative funding opportunity announcement is to encourage applications that will develop and validate novel tools to facilitate the detailed analysis and manipulation of complex circuits in large brains. Critical advances in the treatment of brain disorders in human populations are hindered by our lack of ability to monitor and manipulate circuitry in safe, minimally-invasive ways. Clinical intervention with novel cell and circuit specific tools will require extensive focused research designed to remove barriers to delivery of gene therapies. In addition to identification and removal of barriers, the need to specifically target dysfunctional circuitry poses additional challenges. Neuroscience has experienced an impressive influx of exciting new research tools in the past decade, especially since the launch of The BRAIN Initiative®. However, the majority of these cutting-edge tools have been developed for use in model organisms, primarily rodents, fish and flies. These cutting-edge tools, such as viral delivery of genetic constructs, are increasingly adaptable to larger mammalian brains and more importantly are emerging as potential human therapeutic strategies for brain disorders. A pressing need to develop tools for use in large brains or those that are more directly relevant to the human brain is the focus of this initiative. The initiative will support initial proof of principle studies aimed at demonstrating the feasibility of this approach in humans and other mammalian species (non-human primate [NHP]/sheep/pigs).