The objective of the next phase of the NeuroNex Program at the National Science Foundation is the establishment of distributed, international research networks that build on existing global investments in neurotechnologies to address overarching questions in neuroscience.
The National Science Foundation (NSF) is now soliciting applications for the next phase of the Next Generation Networks for Neuroscience (NeuroNex) Program. The program cultivates technology-enabled, team-based neuroscience: achieving an understanding of brain structure and function that spans levels of organization, spatial and temporal scales, and the diversity of species requires an international, transdisciplinary collaborative effort to not only integrate discipline-specific ideas and approaches but also extend them to stimulate new discoveries, and innovative concepts, theories, and methodologies.
The next phase of the NeuroNex Program seeks to establish distributed, international research networks that build on existing global investments in neurotechnologies to address overarching questions in neuroscience. The creation of such global research networks of excellence will foster international cooperation by seeding close interactions between a wide array of organizations across the world, as well as creating links and articulating alliances between multiple recently launched international brain projects. The potential transformative advances in neuroscience stemming from this activity will have profound scientific and societal impacts.
The goal of this solicitation is to support collaborative networks (~15-20 investigators in each network) comprised of international teams of disciplinarily diverse experimentalists, theorists, and research resource (including technology and cyberinfrastructure) developers working on a common foundational question in neuroscience. It is anticipated that these networks will enable experimentation, analysis, and discovery in neuroscience at scales much larger than currently possible. The NSF and international partner agencies envision a connected portfolio of transformative, integrative projects that leverage existing global investments in neurotechnologies and create synergistic links across domestic and international investigators and communities, yielding novel ways of tackling the challenges of understanding the brain in action and in context.
This interdisciplinary, international program is one element of NSF’s broader effort directed at Understanding the Brain, a multi-year activity that includes NSF’s participation in the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative (https://www.nsf.gov/brain/).
For more information, please view the NSF program solicitation. Preliminary proposals are due June 14, 2019; full proposals are due December 13, 2019.