News

An NIH MedlinePlus magazine feature interview with Dr. Walter Koroshetz, Director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS). Dr. Koroshetz spoke about his passion for the brain, his path to NINDS, and how The Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies^® Initiative, or the BRAIN Initiative^®, is transforming how we understand the brain. 

A small feasibility study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found that an implanted device regulated by the body’s brain activity could provide continual and improved treatment for the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease (PD) in certain people with the disorder

NIH Director Dr. Monica Bertagnolli expresses deep appreciation for the contributions of Asian American and Asian Immigrant scientists to NIH's mission. 

A new study, funded through the BRAIN Initiative and the NIH Common Fund’s Somatic Cell Genome Editing program, describes a promising way to carry genetic material into the brain to reach cellular targets. 

The BRAIN Initiative congratulates Dr. Nancy Kanwisher, Dr. Winrich Freiwald, and Dr. Doris Tsao, co-recipients of the 2024 Kavli Prize in Neuroscience. Together with Dr. A. Paul Alivisatos, this year’s co-recipient of this year’s Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, Drs. Freiwald and Tsao have contributed to the BRAIN Initiative through their science and visionary perspectives.

NIH-funded researchers have been working to restore movement to people living with paralysis. This special Research in Context feature explores the different experimental approaches scientists are developing, including BRAIN-funded researcher Dr. Marco Capogrosso, a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh, to allow people without control of their body’s movements to become more independent and improve their quality of life.

The 10th Annual BRAIN Initiative Conference: Celebrating a Decade of Innovation will convene the BRAIN Initiative community to acknowledge this important milestone.  Attendees will come together to discuss and learn about the latest discoveries in neuroscience in the spirit of the Initiative’s ambitious mission to revolutionize our understanding of the human brain and to accelerate this knowledge into the development of innovative technologies to improve how we treat, prevent, and cure disorders of the brain. This conference is open to the public.

John Ngai, director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN Initiative, and U.S. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman visited in May with Princeton Neuroscience Institute (PNI) researchers to discuss recent advances toward understanding the fundamental workings of the brain.

In this new NIH-supported study, researchers implanted such a device in a brain area known to be important for representing spoken words called the supramarginal gyrus in two people with tetraplegia, a condition marked by full body paralysis from the neck down due to cervical spinal cord injury. The researchers found that the device could decode several words the participants “spoke” only in their minds. While we are far from using such a device to decode whole sentences or even phrases, and the exact mechanisms of internal speech are still under study, the findings, reported in Nature Human Behavior , are notable because it had been unclear whether the brain signals involved in thinking words could be reproducibly translated. The study was supported by the NIH Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies^® (BRAIN) Initiative Research Opportunities in Humans program. 

The NIH Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative has expanded scientists’ understanding of the human brain in recent years, offering fascinating insights into the ways that individual cells and complex neural circuits interact dynamically to enable us to think, feel, and act. But neuroscientists still have much more to learn about how our brains are put together at the most fundamental, subcellular level. As a step in that direction, in a new study supported in part by the NIH BRAIN Initiative and reported in the journal Science , researchers have created the most detailed nanoscale resolution map ever produced of a cubic millimeter of brain tissue, about the size of half a grain of rice.