In a recent “Dear Colleague Letter” (DCL) the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced funding opportunities for Innovative Computational Infrastructure for Understanding the Brain, directed to support initial exploratory actions for creating and sharing computing resources for studying the brain.
NSF, a partner of the BRAIN Initiative®, announced plans in February to create a National Brain Observatory to facilitate large-scale collaborative research efforts in neuroscience. As part of this, the NSF Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) recently published a DCL with funding opportunities to support activities associated with “the creation of comprehensive shared computational infrastructure solutions that are designed to transform the practice of collaborative neuroscience and enable systematic and grand-scale investigations of the brain and nervous system.” Two types of funding requests are being considered:
- Proposals for Conferences that would bring together neuroscientists and computational infrastructure developers, and
- Early-Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) proposals for high-risk/high reward projects.
NSF expects that enhancing computational infrastructure resources and capabilities, such as improving the ability to integrate and analyze data from different basic, translational, and computational models, will significantly benefit the greater neuroscience community. Interested parties can find comprehensive information about this specific DCL, which has a submission date of May 20, 2016, here: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2016/nsf16076/nsf16076.jsp.