Over the next several years, the FAS Research Development group will track and disseminate all funding opportunities related to the BRAIN Initiative. These funding opportunities will be sent to a targeted list of faculty. The list will include faculty affiliates of the Center for Brain Science (CBS) and the Mind Brain Behavior (MBB) Interfaculty Initiative. This project is being carried out in collaboration with the Center for Brain Science. All opportunities will be archived and recipients may unsubscribe at any time.

New BRAIN Initiative Funding Opportunities from the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation
  • NIH: BRAIN Initiative: Short Courses in Computational Neuroscience (R25) 
  • NIH: BRAIN Initiative: Short Courses in Research Tools and Methods (R25)
  • NSF: Science of Learning: Collaborative Networks (SL-CN)

National Institutes of Health
BRAIN Initiative: Short Courses in Computational Neuroscience (R25)
Letter of Intent Deadline (Optional): February 18, 2015
Full Proposal Deadline: March 18, 2015 by 5PM
Award Amount: Budgets are limited to $200,000 in direct costs annually and are expected to reflect the actual needs of the proposed project. Awards are for up to 3 years of support. NIH will fund 5-8 awards for a total of up to $1.5M in FY15. 

The NIH Research Education Program (R25) supports research education activities in the mission areas of the NIH. The over-arching goal of this program is to support educational activities that complement and/or enhance the training of a workforce to meet the nation's biomedical, behavioral and clinical research needs. To that end, this FOA will support creative educational activities with a primary focus on Courses for Skills Development. This FOA will support short courses to facilitate the development of a sophisticated cadre of investigators with the requisite knowledge and skills in computational neuroscience perspectives and techniques for analyzing and interpreting complex, high-dimensional neuroscience data to advance the BRAIN Initiative. For the purposes of this FOA, computational neuroscience encompasses theoretical neuroscience, computational and mathematical modeling of neural systems, and/or statistical perspectives and techniques. Each short course is expected to include both didactics and in-person/hands-on experiences. This FOA is intended for participants who are graduate students, medical students, postdoctoral scholars, medical residents, and/or early-career faculty. 

National Institutes of Health
BRAIN Initiative: Short Courses in Research Tools and Methods (R25)
Letter of Intent Deadline (Optional): February 18, 2015
Full Proposal Deadline: March 18, 2015 by 5PM
Award Amount: Budgets are limited to $250,000 in direct costs annually and are expected to reflect the actual needs of the proposed project. Awards are for up to 3 years of support. NIH will fund 4-6 awards for a total of up to $1.5M in FY15. 

The NIH Research Education Program (R25) supports research education activities in the mission areas of the NIH. The over-arching goal of this program is to support educational activities that complement and/or enhance the training of a workforce to meet the nation's biomedical, behavioral and clinical research needs. To that end, this FOA will support creative educational activities with a primary focus on Courses for Skills Development that will build participants' foundational knowledge and skills in the rigorous use of state-of-the art scientific tools and methods that contribute to, and are developed in response to, the major goals of the BRAIN Initiative. Each short course is expected to include both didactics and in-person / hands-on experiences. This FOA is intended for participants who are graduate students, medical students, postdoctoral scholars, medical residents, and/or early-career faculty. 

National Science Foundation
Science of Learning: Collaborative Networks (SL-CN)
Letter of Intent Deadline (Required): February 6, 2015
Full Proposal Deadline: March 18, 2015 by 5PM
Award Amount: Budgets are limited to $750,000 total costs over the full duration of the project. Awards are for up to 3 years of support. NSF expects to fund 12 awards for a total of up to $9M in FY15.  

The goals of the SL Program are to: advance fundamental knowledge about learning through integrated research; connect the research to specific scientific, technological, educational, and workforce challenges; and enable research communities to capitalize on new opportunities and discoveries. The Program is designed to support projects that - due to the activities supported and their interdisciplinarity and integrative breadth - do not fit into existing NSF programs. This solicitation invites proposals for the creation of new research networks to address important questions in the SL. Networks will focus on:
  • Advancing basic research through integrative, interdisciplinary perspectives and methodologies, through integration of theory and experiment, and across scales of analysis; and/or
  • Translating findings from basic research on learning to applications to benefit society and further inform fundamental theories of learning.

Each network is expected to engage in both of the following activities:

  1. Partnership-building activities among the network participants to optimize scientific exchange for the co-design and execution of network goals; and
  2. Collaborative, exploratory research to be conducted by the network participants.
The SL goals are congruent with the BRAIN Initiative, which will accelerate the development and application of new technologies that will enable researchers to produce dynamic pictures of the brain that show how individual brain cells and complex neural circuits interact at the speed of thought. These technologies will open new doors to explore how the brain records, processes, uses, stores, and retrieves vast quantities of information, and shed light on the complex links between brain function and behavior.
Additional information:

FAS Research Development BRAIN Initiative Archive

Contact Us:
Questions about this announcement or proposal submission may be directed to Jennifer Corby
(jcorby@fas.harvard.edu, 617-495-1590) or Susan Gomes (sgomes@fas.harvard.edu 617-496-9448).

 

For Research Development Support (Finding Funding, Proposal Development Resources), go to research.fas.harvard.edu/research-development-support