The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) InitiativeSM is a bold undertaking aimed at revolutionizing our understanding of the human brain. Since its inception in April of 2013, it has grown to include five Federal agencies – the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Science Foundation (NSF), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA). The President’s 2016 Budget proposes increasing federal funding for The BRAIN InitiativeSM from about $200 million in FY 2015 to more than $300 million in FY 2016.
Included in the President’s 2016 Budget is a proposed $135 million for the NIH to invest in The BRAIN InitiativeSM, which would be an increase of about $60 million over the FY 2015 BRAIN InitiativeSM appropriation for NIH. This investment will support a diverse set of projects with ambitious goals, including developing new devices to record and modulate activity in the human nervous system, revolutionizing human neuroimaging technologies to understand how individual cells and complex neural circuits interact in time and space, and modeling and analyzing the complex data that scientists obtain in their quest to understand how the brain works. Taken together, these research efforts aim to develop and apply cutting-edge technologies to create a dynamic picture of the brain in action, providing the critical knowledge base for researchers seeking new ways to treat, cure, and even prevent brain disorders.