Institute News: Announcements

Feng Zhang receives 2016 Canada Gairdner International Award

Anne Trafton |

Feng Zhang, a core institute member of the Broad Institute, an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, and W. M. Keck Career Development Associate Professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, has been named a recipient of the 2016 Canada Gairdner International Award — Canada’s most prestigious scientific prize — for his role in developing the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing system.

In January 2013 Zhang and his team were first to report CRISPR-based genome editing in mammalian cells, in what has become the most-cited paper in the CRISPR field. He is one of five scientists the Gairdner Foundation is honoring for work with CRISPR. Zhang shares the award with Rodolphe Barrangou from North Carolina State University; Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Institute; Jennifer Doudna of the University of California at Berkeley and Phillipe Horvath from DuPont Nutrition and Health.

“The Gairdner Award is a tremendous recognition for my entire team, and it is a great honor to share this recognition with other pioneers in the CRISPR field,” Zhang says. “In the next decade, the understanding and the discoveries that scientists are going to be able to make using the CRISPR-Cas9 system will lead to new innovations that will translate into new therapeutics and new products that can benefit our lives.”

Although Zhang is well-known for his work with CRISPR, the 34-year-old scientist has a long track record of innovation. As a graduate student at Stanford University, Zhang worked with Karl Deisseroth and Edward Boyden, who is now also a professor at MIT, to develop optogenetics, in which neuronal activity can be controlled with light. The three shared the Perl-UNC Prize in Neuroscience in 2012 as recognition of these efforts. Zhang has also received the National Science Foundation’s Alan T. Waterman Award (2014), the Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award in Biotechnology and Medicine (2014, shared with Charpentier and Doudna), the Tsuneko & Reiji Okazaki Award (2015), and the Human Genome Organization (HUGO) Chen New Investigator Award (2016).

One of Zhang’s long-term goals is to use genome-editing technologies to better understand the nervous system and develop new approaches to the treatment of psychiatric disease. The Zhang lab has shared CRISPR-Cas9 components in response to nearly 30,000 requests from academic laboratories around the world and has trained thousands of researchers in the use of CRISPR-Cas9 genome-editing technology through in-person events and online opportunities. In his current research, he continues to improve and expand the gene-editing toolbox. “I feel incredibly fortunate and excited to work with an incredible team of students and postdocs to continue advancing our ability to edit and understand the genome,” Zhang says.

“CRISPR is a revolutionary breakthrough that will advance the frontiers of science and enable us to meet the health challenges of the 21st century in ways we are only beginning to imagine,” says Michael Sipser, dean of MIT’s School of Science and the Barton L. Weller Professor of Mathematics. “I am exceedingly proud of the contributions Feng has made to MIT and the greater community of scientists, and extend my heartfelt congratulations to him and his colleagues.”

“CRISPR is a great example of how the scientific community can come together and make stunning progress in a short period of time,” says Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute. “On behalf of my colleagues at the Broad and MIT, I wish to congratulate Feng and all the winners of this prestigious award, as well as the teams of scientists and all others who have contributed to these transformational discoveries.”

The Canada Gairdner International Awards, created in 1959, are given annually to recognize and reward the achievements of medical researchers whose work contributes significantly to the understanding of human biology and disease. The awards provide a $100,000 (CDN) prize to each scientist for their work. Each year, the five honorees of the International Awards are selected after a rigorous two-part review, with the winners voted by secret ballot by a medical advisory board composed of 33 eminent scientists from around the world.

The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard was launched in 2004 to empower this generation of creative scientists to transform medicine. The Broad Institute seeks to describe all the molecular components of life and their connections; discover the molecular basis of major human diseases; develop effective new approaches to diagnostics and therapeutics; and disseminate discoveries, tools, methods, and data openly to the entire scientific community.

Founded by MIT, Harvard, Harvard-affiliated hospitals, and the visionary Los Angeles philanthropists Eli and Edythe L. Broad, the Broad Institute includes faculty, professional staff, and students from throughout the MIT and Harvard biomedical research communities and beyond, with collaborations spanning over a hundred private and public institutions in more than 40 countries worldwide. For further information about the Broad Institute, visit: http://www.broadinstitute.org.

McGovern Institute awards prize to neurogeneticist Cori Bargmann

Anne Trafton |

The McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT announced today that Cornelia Bargmann of The Rockefeller University is the winner of the 2016 Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience. The Prize is awarded annually by the McGovern Institute to recognize outstanding advances in any field of neuroscience. Bargmann is recognized for her work on the genetic and neural mechanisms that control behavior in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans.

Bargmann is currently the Torsten N. Wiesel Professor at The Rockefeller University and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. She was a faculty member at University of California, San Francisco for 13 years before moving to Rockefeller in 2004.

Bargmann received her Ph.D. from MIT, where she studied with Robert Weinberg, making important contributions to cancer biology including the identification of the HER2/neu oncogene that is now an important target for the treatment of breast cancer. For her postdoctoral studies, she joined the MIT laboratory of H. Robert Horvitz, now a McGovern investigator, where she began to study the nervous system of the microscopic nematode worm C. elegans. With just 302 neurons, whose connections are known, C. elegans is ideally suited for understanding the genetic and neural mechanisms that control behavior, with a level of precision not possible in more complex organisms. At MIT, Bargmann demonstrated that worms can sense volatile odors via specific chemosensory neurons, and she identified genes that affected the animals’ responses to specific odorants, setting the stage for a genetic analysis of chemosensory behavior that she subsequently pursued in her own lab at UCSF and The Rockefeller University.

Among Bargmann’s important early contributions was the demonstration in 1996 that the gene odr-10 encodes an odorant receptor (OR) that is specific for diacetyl, a volatile compound that gives butter its distinct smell and to which worms are strongly attracted. Although putative ORs had been identified in other species, it had proved difficult to identify specific ligands for individual receptors, and Bargmann’s discovery, the first example in any species, opened many new research directions. In one especially elegant experiment, she and her team were able to drive expression of odr-10 in another sensory neuron that normally responds to repulsive odors, causing the worms to avoid the previously attractive diacetyl. This experiment provides one of the most compelling demonstrations of the “labeled line” hypothesis, in which the response to a sensory stimulus is determined not by the inherent properties of the stimulus itself but by the identity of the neuronal connection that transmits the signal.

This work was followed by detailed studies of the mechanisms by which worms sense and respond flexibly to chemical cues in their environment, in which Bargmann and her colleagues traced the flow of information from sensory inputs to motor outputs through circuits of identified neurons. Bargmann also provided a clear demonstration of learning in worms, showing that animals exposed to pathogenic bacteria can learn to avoid odorants associated with the pathogen. Interestingly, this avoidance response is mediated by the neurotransmitter serotonin, which is also plays important role in mammalian nausea, suggesting an ancient conserved mechanism for conditioned food aversion.

Building on her olfaction work, Bargmann has also studied the neural basis of social behavior, which in worms is strongly regulated by chemical cues. In one set of papers, for example, she identified a single neuron that integrates information from multiple chemical cues including food, oxygen and pheromones, to control the expression of social behavior. Bargmann’s work has encompassed many other areas of neuroscience, and by combining behavioral analysis with genetic manipulations and laser ablation of individual identified cells, she has revealed the diverse genetic and cellular mechanisms through which a simple nervous system can produce a wide range of behaviors.

Bargmann has received many awards and honors for her work, including the Kavli Neuroscience Prize and the Breakthrough Prize for Life Sciences. She has been elected to both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences, and she served as co-chair of the advisory committee for the NIH BRAIN initiative.

The McGovern Institute will award the Scolnick Prize to Dr. Bargmann on Wednesday March 30, 2016. At 4.00 pm she will deliver a lecture entitled “Genes, neurons, circuits and behavior:  an integrated approach in a compact brain,” to be followed by a reception, at the McGovern Institute in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex, 43 Vassar Street (building 46, room 3002) in Cambridge. The event is free and open to the public.

About the Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience
The Scolnick Prize, awarded annually by the McGovern Institute, is named in honor of Dr. Edward M. Scolnick, who stepped down as President of Merck Research Laboratories in December 2002 after holding Merck’s top research post for 17 years. Dr. Scolnick is now a core member of the Broad Institute, where he is chief scientist at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research. He also serves as a member of the McGovern Institute’s governing board. The prize, which is endowed through a gift from Merck to the McGovern Institute, consists of a $125,000 award, plus an inscribed gift. Previous winners are Charles Gilbert (The Rockefeller University), Huda Zoghbi (Baylor College of Medicine), Thomas Jessell (Columbia University), Roger Nicoll (University of California, San Francisco), Bruce McEwen (The Rockefeller University), Lily and Yuh-Nung Jan (University of California, San Francisco), Jeremy Nathans (Johns Hopkins University), Michael Davis (Emory University), David Julius (University of California, San Francisco), Michael Greenberg (Harvard Medical School), Judith Rapoport (National Institute of Mental Health) and Mark Konishi (California Institute of Technology).

Edward Boyden wins BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award

Anne Trafton |

Edward S. Boyden, a professor of media arts and sciences, biological engineering, and brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, has won the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Biomedicine for his role in the development of optogenetics, a technique for controlling brain activity with light. Gero Miesenböck of the University of Oxford and Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University were also honored with the prize for their role in developing and refining the technique.

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards are given annually for “outstanding contributions and radical advances in a broad range of scientific, technological and artistic areas.” The €400.000 prize in the category of biomedicine will be shared among the three neuroscientists.

“If we imagine the brain as a computer, optogenetics is a keyboard that allows us to send extremely precise commands,” says Boyden, a a faculty member at the MIT Media Lab with a joint appointment at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. “It is a tool whereby we can control the brain with exquisite precision.”

Boyden joins an illustrious list of prize laureates including physicist Stephen Hawking and artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky of MIT, who died on January 24.

The BBVA Foundation will host the winners at an awards ceremony on June 21, 2016 at the foundation’s headquarters in Madrid, Spain.

About the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards

The BBVA Foundation promotes, funds and disseminates world-class scientific research and artistic creation, in the conviction that science, culture and knowledge hold the key to better opportunities for all world citizens. The Foundation designs and implements its programs in partnership with some of the leading scientific and cultural organizations in Spain and abroad, striving to identify and prioritize those projects with the power to significantly advance the frontiers of the known world.

The juries in each of eight categories are made up of leading international experts in their respective fields, who arrive at their decisions in a wholly independent manner, applying internationally recognized metrics of excellence. The BBVA Foundation is aided in the organization of the awards by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC).

Ed Boyden wins 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences

Anne Trafton |

MIT researchers took home several awards last night at the 2016 Breakthrough Prize ceremony at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

Edward Boyden, an associate professor of media arts and sciences, biological engineering, and brain and cognitive sciences, was one of five scientists honored with the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, given for “transformative advances toward understanding living systems and extending human life.” He will receive $3 million for the award.

MIT physicists also contributed to a project that won the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. That prize went to five experiments investigating the oscillation of subatomic particles known as neutrinos. More than 1,300 contributing physicists will share in the recognition for their work, according to the award announcement. Those physicists include MIT associate professor of physics Joseph Formaggio and his team, as well as MIT assistant professor of physics Lindley Winslow.

Larry Guth, an MIT professor of mathematics, was honored with the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize, which is given to promising junior researchers who have already produced important work in mathematics. Liang Fu, an assistant professor of physics, was honored with the New Horizons in Physics Prize, which is awarded to promising junior researchers who have already produced important work in fundamental physics.

“By challenging conventional thinking and expanding knowledge over the long term, scientists can solve the biggest problems of our time,” said Mark Zuckerberg, chairman and CEO of Facebook, and one of the prizes’ founders. “The Breakthrough Prize honors achievements in science and math so we can encourage more pioneering research and celebrate scientists as the heroes they truly are.”

Optogenetics

Boyden was honored for the development and implementation of optogenetics, a technique in which scientists can control neurons by shining light on them. Karl Deisseroth, a Stanford University professor who worked with Boyden to pioneer the technique, was also honored with one of the life sciences prizes.

Optogenetics relies on light-sensitive proteins, originally isolated from bacteria and algae. About 10 years ago, Boyden and Deisseroth began engineering neurons to express these proteins, allowing them to selectively stimulate or silence them with pulses of light. More recently, Boyden has developed additional proteins that are even more sensitive to light and can respond to different colors.

Scientists around the world have used optogenetics to reveal the brain circuitry underlying normal neural function as well as neurological disorders such as autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression.

Boyden is a member of the MIT Media Lab and MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research.

Neutrino oscillations

The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to five research projects investigating the nature of neutrinos: Daya Bay (China); KamLAND (Japan); K2K/T2K (Japan); Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (Canada); and Super-Kamiokande (Japan). Researchers with these experiments were recognized “for the fundamental discovery of neutrino oscillations, revealing a new frontier beyond, and possibly far beyond, the standard model of particle physics.”

Formaggio and his team at MIT have been collaborating on the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) project since 2005. Research at the observatory, 2 kilometers underground in a mine near Sudbury, Ontario, demonstrated that neutrinos change their type — or “flavor” — on their way to Earth from the sun.

Winslow has been a collaborator on KamLAND, located in a mine in Japan, since 2001. Using antineutrinos from nuclear reactors, this experiment demonstrated that the change in flavor was energy-dependent. The combination of these results solved the solar neutrino puzzle and proved that neutrinos have mass.

The MIT SNO group has participated heavily on the analysis of neutrino data, particularly during that experiment’s final measurement phase. The MIT KamLAND group is involved with the next phase, KamLAND-Zen, which is searching for a rare nuclear process that if observed, would make neutrinos their own antiparticles.

Reaching new horizons

Guth, who will receive a $100,000 prize, was honored for his “ingenious and surprising solutions to long standing open problems in symplectic geometry, Riemannian geometry, harmonic analysis, and combinatorial geometry.”

Guth’s work at MIT focuses on combinatorics, or the study of discrete structures, and how sets of lines intersect each other in space. He also works in the area of harmonic analysis, studying how sound waves interact with each other.

Guth’s father, MIT physicist Alan Guth, won the inaugural Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2015.

Fu will share a New Horizons in Physics Prize with two other researchers: B. Andrei Bernevig of Princeton University and Xiao-Liang Qi of Stanford University. The physicists were honored for their “outstanding contributions to condensed matter physics, especially involving the use of topology to understand new states of matter.”

Fu works on theories of topological insulators — a new class of materials whose surfaces can freely conduct electrons even though their interiors are electrical insulators — and topological superconductors. Such materials may provide insight into quantum physics and have possible applications in creating transistors based on the spin of particles rather than their charge.

Yesterday’s prize ceremony was hosted by producer/actor/director Seth MacFarlane; awards were presented by the prize sponsors and by celebrities including actors Russell Crowe, Hilary Swank, and Lily Collins. The Breakthrough Prizes were founded by Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Jack Ma and Cathy Zhang, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan.

“Breakthrough Prize laureates are making fundamental discoveries about the universe, life, and the mind,” Yuri Milner said. “These fields of investigation are advancing at an exponential pace, yet the biggest questions remain to be answered.”

McGovern Institute awards prize to vision scientist Charles Gilbert

Anne Trafton |

The McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT announced today that Charles D. Gilbert of The Rockefeller University is the winner of the 2015 Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience. The Prize is awarded annually by the McGovern Institute to recognize outstanding advances in any field of neuroscience.

“Charles Gilbert has been a pioneer in understanding the function of visual cortex,” says Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute and chair of the selection committee. “His work addresses fundamental questions about visual perception, and has also provided important insights into how the brain recovers from injury and degenerative disease.”

Gilbert is currently the Arthur and Janet Ross Professor and head of the laboratory of neurobiology at The Rockefeller University. He received his MD and PhD from Harvard University, where he later became an assistant professor before joining the Rockefeller faculty in 1983. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001 and to the National Academy of Sciences in 2006.

While at Harvard, Gilbert began a longstanding collaboration with Torsten Wiesel, who shared the 1981 Nobel Prize for his work with David Hubel on the function of the visual cortex. Together with Wiesel, Gilbert described the lateral neuronal connections within the cortex, which are central to our current understanding of cortical function. The primary visual cortex contains a topographic map of the visual field that is transmitted from the retina, with each neuron responding to stimuli at a particular location in visual space, known as its receptive field. But as Gilbert’s work revealed, the cortex also contains an extensive network of lateral connections that allow neurons to respond not just to the stimuli in their primary receptive fields, but also to contextual information from other parts of the image. This is central to our ability to perceive large-scale features within the clutter of natural visual scenes.

Gilbert went on on to discover that these horizontal connections play an important role in the brain’s plasticity. If a blind patch is created on retina, the corresponding patch of cortex is initially unresponsive, but soon begins to respond to stimuli delivered to the surrounding part of the visual field, causing us to be unaware of any perceptual gap. Gilbert discovered the mechanism underlying this form of plasticity, demonstrating the anatomical growth of horizontal connections within the previously inactive patch of cortex and describing the intricate changes in connectivity that follow. These studies focused on the visual cortex, but similar circuits and mechanisms are thought to exist throughout the brain, and to underlie its ability to recover after damage or disease.

The plasticity of these horizontal connections is important not only for recovery after injury, but also for perceptual learning, a form of brain plasticity that persists throughout life. It has long been recognized that visual perceptual abilities (for example, the ability to do perceptual grouping of scene components) can improve with practice, and Gilbert has studied the neural basis of this phenomenon. He identified changes in the functional properties of cortical neurons that correlate with perceptual learning, and showed that these changes are seen only during the performance of the specific learned task, indicating that they are controlled by top-down influences such as attention and expectation that depend on behavioral context. This work has led to a new view of cortical neurons as ‘adaptive processors’ that can select task-relevant inputs through an interaction between top-down signals and local cortical connections.

The McGovern Institute will award the Scolnick Prize to Dr Gilbert on Friday March 20, 2015. At 4.00 pm he will deliver a lecture entitled “The Dynamic Brain,” to be followed by a reception, at the McGovern Institute in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences Complex, 43 Vassar Street (Building 46, Room 3002) in Cambridge. The event is free and open to the public.

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About the Edward M. Scolnick Prize in Neuroscience:
The Scolnick Prize, awarded annually by the McGovern Institute, is named in honor of Dr. Edward M. Scolnick, who stepped down as President of Merck Research Laboratories in December 2002 after holding Merck’s top research post for 17 years. Dr. Scolnick is now a core member of the Broad Institute, where he is chief scientist at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research. He also serves as a member of the McGovern Institute’s governing board. The prize, which is endowed through a gift from Merck to the McGovern Institute, consists of a $100,000 award, plus an inscribed gift. Previous winners are Huda Zoghbi (Baylor College of Medicine), Thomas Jessell (Columbia University), Roger Nicoll (University of California, San Francisco), Bruce McEwen (Rockefeller University), Lily and Yuh-Nung Jan (University of California, San Francisco), Jeremy Nathans (Johns Hopkins University), Michael Davis (Emory University), David Julius (University of California, San Francisco), Michael Greenberg (Harvard Medical School), Judith Rapoport (National Institute of Mental Health) and Mark Konishi (California Institute of Technology).

MIT researchers to win awards from the Society for Neuroscience

Anne Trafton |

Three neuroscientists at MIT have been selected to receive awards from the Society for Neuroscience (SfN).

Tomaso Poggio, a founding member of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, will receive the Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience; Feng Zhang, a member of the McGovern Institute and an assistant professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, will receive the Young Investigator Award; and Sung-Yon Kim, a Simons postdoctoral fellow of the Life Sciences Research Foundation at MIT, will receive the Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience.
 
The awards will be presented during Neuroscience 2014, the SfN’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.

Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience
 

The $25,000 Swartz Prize for Theoretical and Computational Neuroscience, supported by the Swartz Foundation, recognizes an individual who has produced a significant cumulative contribution to theoretical models or computational methods in neuroscience.

“Dr. Poggio’s contributions to the development of computational and theoretical models of the human visual system have served to advance our understanding of how human systems learn from experience,” said Carol Mason, president of SfN. “It is an honor to recognize him as a founder and driving force in the field of computational neuroscience.”

Poggio, the Eugene McDermott Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the director of the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines, develops computational models of the brain to understand human intelligence. Specifically, he has developed models that mimic the ways that humans learn to recognize objects, such as faces, and actions, such as motion — applications now present in digital cameras and some cars. Poggio is currently working to develop more complex models that mimic the forward as well as feedback signals that the human brain uses during visual recognition. The ultimate goal of this research is to better understand how the brain works and to apply this technology to build intelligent machines.


Young Investigator Award
 

The SfN has also named two winners of this year’s Young Investigator Award: Feng Zhang of MIT and Diana Bautista of the University of California at Berkeley.

The $15,000 award recognizes the outstanding achievements and contributions by a young neuroscientist who has recently received his or her advanced professional degree.

“Drs. Zhang and Bautista are two young neuroscientists who have demonstrated remarkable dedication to their work,” Mason said. “Their creative research is advancing their respective fields, and their commitment to helping other scientists succeed is an inspiration to us all.”

Zhang, who is also a core member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and the W. M. Keck Career Development Professor in Biomedical Engineering, uses synthetic biology methods to study brain disease.
 
As a graduate student at Stanford University, Zhang was instrumental in advancing the development of optogenetic technology, which allows researchers to manipulate genetically modified neurons with light. More recently, Zhang was a leader in the development of the CRISPR-Cas9 method for genome editing – a powerful new technology with many applications in biomedical research, including the potential to treat human genetic disease.

Donald B. Lindsley Prize in Behavioral Neuroscience
 


The SfN will award the Donald B. Lindsley Prize to Sung-Yon Kim, a postdoc in Kwanghun Chung’s lab at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory.

Supported by The Grass Foundation, the prize recognizes an outstanding PhD thesis in the area of general behavioral neuroscience.
 
Kim, who earned his PhD at Stanford University, used optogenetics to study the brain circuits underlying anxiety.

“The Society is pleased to honor Dr. Kim’s groundbreaking research in the neuroanatomical basis of anxiety behavior,” said Mason. “His approach to behavioral neuroscience will likely have a broad and lasting impact on biology and medicine.”

Fifteen MIT scientists receive NIH BRAIN Initiative grants

Anne Trafton |

Today, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced their first round of BRAIN Initiative award recipients. Six teams and 15 researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were recipients.

Mriganka Sur, principal investigator at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Paul E. Newton Professor of Neuroscience in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences (BCS) leads a team studying cortical circuits and information flow during memory-guided perceptual decisions. Co-principal investigators include Emery Brown, BCS professor of computational neuroscience and the Edward Hood Taplin Professor of Medical Engineering; Kwanghun Chung, Picower Institute principal investigator and assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES); and Ian Wickersham, research scientist at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research and head of MIT’s Genetic Neuroengineering Group.

Elly Nedivi, Picower Institute principal investigator and professor in BCS and the Department of Biology, leads a team studying new methods for high-speed monitoring of sensory-driven synaptic activity across all inputs to single living neurons in the context of the intact cerebral cortex. Her co-principal investigator is Peter So, professor of mechanical and biological engineering, and director of the MIT Laser Biomedical Research Center.

Ian Wickersham will lead a team looking at novel technologies for nontoxic transsynaptic tracing. His co-principal investigators include Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute and the Doris and Don Berkey Professor of Neuroscience in BCS; Li-Huei Tsai, director of the Picower Institute and the Picower Professor of Neuroscience in BCS; and Kay Tye, Picower Institute principal investigator and assistant professor of neuroscience in BCS.

Robert Desimone will lead a team studying vascular interfaces for brain imaging and stimulation. Co-principal investigators include Ed Boyden, associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, McGovern Institute, and departments of BCS and Biological Engineering; head of MIT’s Synthetic Neurobiology Group, and co-director of MIT’s Center for Neurobiological Engineering; and Elazer Edelman, the Thomas D. and Virginia W. Cabot Professor of Health Sciences and Technology in IMES and director of the Harvard-MIT Biomedical Engineering Center. Collaborators on this project include: Rodolfo Llinas (New York University), George Church (Harvard University), Jan Rabaey (University of California at Berkeley), Pablo Blinder (Tel Aviv University), Eric Leuthardt (Washington University/St. Louis), Michel Maharbiz (Berkeley), Jose Carmena (Berkeley), Elad Alon (Berkeley), Colin Derdeyn (Washington University in St. Louis), Lowell Wood (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation), Xue Han (Boston University), and Adam Marblestone (MIT).

Ed Boyden will be co-principal investigator with Mark Bathe, associate professor of biological engineering, and Peng Yin of Harvard on a project to study ultra-multiplexed nanoscale in situ proteomics for understanding synapse types.

Alan Jasanoff, associate professor of biological engineering and director of the MIT Center for Neurobiological Engineering, will lead a team looking at calcium sensors for molecular fMRI. Stephen Lippard, the Arthur Amos Noyes Professor of Chemistry, is co-principal investigator.

In addition, Sur and Wickersham also received BRAIN Early Concept Grants for Exploratory Research (EAGER) from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Sur will focus on massive-scale multi-area single neuron recordings to reveal circuits underlying short-term memory. Wickersham, in collaboration with Li-Huei Tsai, Kay Tye, and Robert Desimone, will develop cell-type specific optogenetics in wild-type animals. Additional information about NSF support of the BRAIN initiative can be found at NSF.gov/brain.

The BRAIN Initiative, spearheaded by President Obama in April 2013, challenges the nation’s leading scientists to advance our sophisticated understanding of the human mind and discover new ways to treat, prevent, and cure neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, and traumatic brain injury. The scientific community is charged with accelerating the invention of cutting-edge technologies that can produce dynamic images of complex neural circuits and illuminate the interaction of lightning-fast brain cells. The new capabilities are expected to provide greater insights into how brain functionality is linked to behavior, learning, memory, and the underlying mechanisms of debilitating disease. BRAIN was launched with approximately $100 million in initial investments from the NIH, the National Science Foundation, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

BRAIN Initiative scientists are engaged in a challenging and transformative endeavor to explore how our minds instantaneously processes, store, and retrieve vast quantities of information. Their discoveries will unlock many of the remaining mysteries inherent in the brain’s billions of neurons and trillions of connections, leading to a deeper understanding of the underlying causes of many neurological and psychiatric conditions. Their findings will enable scientists and doctors to develop the groundbreaking arsenal of tools and technologies required to more effectively treat those suffering from these devastating disorders.

NIH awards initial $46 million for BRAIN Initiative research

Anne Trafton |

The National Institutes of Health announced today its first wave of investments totaling $46 million in fiscal year 14 funds to support the goals of the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative. More than 100 investigators in 15 states and several countries will work to develop new tools and technologies to understand neural circuit function and capture a dynamic view of the brain in action. These new tools and this deeper understanding will ultimately catalyze new treatments and cures for devastating brain disorders and diseases that are estimated by the World Health Organization to affect more than one billion people worldwide. Six MIT projects were funded, including four projects led by McGovern Institute researchers.

“The human brain is the most complicated biological structure in the known universe. We’ve only just scratched the surface in understanding how it works — or, unfortunately, doesn’t quite work when disorders and disease occur,” said NIH Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. “There’s a big gap between what we want to do in brain research and the technologies available to make exploration possible. These initial awards are part of a 12-year scientific plan focused on developing the tools and technologies needed to make the next leap in understanding the brain. This is just the beginning of an ambitious journey and we’re excited about the possibilities.”

Creating a wearable scanner to image the human brain in motion, using lasers to guide nerve cell firing, recording the entire nervous system in action, stimulating specific circuits with radio waves, and identifying complex circuits with DNA barcodes are among the 58 projects announced today. The majority of the grants focus on developing transformative technologies that will accelerate fundamental neuroscience research and include:

• classifying the myriad cell types in the brain
• producing tools and techniques for analyzing brain cells and circuits
• creating next-generation human brain imaging technology
• developing methods for large-scale recordings of brain activity
• integrating experiments with theories and models to understand the functions of specific brain circuits

“How do the billions of cells in our brain control our thoughts, feelings, and movements? That’s ultimately what the BRAIN Initiative is about,” said Thomas R. Insel, M.D., director of the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health. “Understanding this will greatly help us meet the rising challenges that brain disorders pose for the future health of the nation.”

Last year, President Obama launched the BRAIN Initiative as a large-scale effort to equip researchers with fundamental insights necessary for treating a wide variety of brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury. Four federal agencies — NIH, the National Science Foundation, the Food and Drug Administration and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — stepped up to the “grand challenge” and committed more than $110 million to the Initiative for fiscal year 2014. Planning for the NIH component of the BRAIN initiative is guided by the long-term scientific plan, “BRAIN 2025: A Scientific Vision” that details seven high-priority research areas.

Later today, the White House is hosting a conference on the BRAIN Initiative where new Federal and private sector commitments will be unveiled in support of this ambitious and important effort.

“We are at a critical juncture for brain research, and these audacious projects are from some of the brightest researchers in neuroscience collaborating with physicists and engineers,” said Story Landis, Ph.D., director of the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

For a list of all the projects, please visit: http://braininitiative.nih.gov/nih-brain-awards.htm

For more information about the BRAIN Initiative, please visit: http://www.nih.gov/science/brain/

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About the National Institutes of Health (NIH): NIH, the nation’s medical research agency, includes 27 Institutes and Centers and is a component of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. NIH is the primary federal agency conducting and supporting basic, clinical, and translational medical research, and is investigating the causes, treatments, and cures for both common and rare diseases. For more information about NIH and its programs, visit http://www.nih.gov.

Feng Zhang shares Gabbay Award for CRISPR research

Anne Trafton |

Feng Zhang of MIT and the Broad Institute, Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Emmanuelle Charpentier of Umeå University have been awarded Brandeis University’s 17th Annual Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award in Biotechnology and Medicine.

The researchers are being honored for their work on the CRISPR/cas system, a genome editing technology that allows scientists to make precise changes to a DNA sequence — an advance that is expected to transform many areas of biomedical research and may ultimately form the basis of new treatments for human genetic disease.