Operations and Maintenance Support of the Neurophotonics Centre

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The Neurophotonics Centre is a one of its kind, state-of-the-art national facility to support advanced Biophotonics approaches dedicated to the understanding of the brain, the development of diagnostics for brain disorders and phototherapy. The Centre brings together scientists and staff from coast to coast to develop and use the most innovative methods integrating neuroscience and photonics. The Facility, located within the Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Québec, has received over 95M$ in funding in the last 10 years for its development, maintenance and support of its core activities from the Canadian Foundation for Innovation (CFI) and partners, the Quebec Government, NSERC, CIHR, the Canada Excellence Research Chair program and Brain Canada. The mission of the Neurophotonics Centre is to develop the approaches of tomorrow to help solve the mysteries of the brain and to make available these tools to scientists across Canada. It is also dedicated to the training of a new generation of scientists capable of developing the necessary technology to tackle unsolved brain-related function and disorders. Since 2007, the Centre has hosted two research training programs (CIHR Neurophysics and NSERC CREATE in Biophotonics), supporting the training of more than 350 students and postdocs. It has also been hosting a yearly Frontiers in Neurophotonics Summer school, which provides hands on training of HQP at the interface of neuroscience, optics-photonics, engineering and chemistry. Over the years, over 200 PhD students and postdocs from 15 countries, selected on a competitive basis, have attended our Summer school. The Centre presently occupies 3,000 m2. It includes 6 clean rooms, 46 microscopy rooms, wet labs, cold rooms, tissue culture rooms, histology rooms, and a workshop for instrument design. Research conducted in the Centre ranges from the tracking of individual neuroreceptors at synapses to in vivo imaging, photometry and photo-intervention in behaving animals. The development and use of light-based tools to probe, stimulate, and control neurons and neural circuits is the common denominator of all researchers working in the Centre. Several new technologies have been developed at the Centre for use by the community, including micro-optrodes, super-resolution and holography techniques, novel non-linear microscopies, integrated wireless devices and image analysis methods. Operating funds obtained for the Neurophotonics Centre have enabled equipment repairs, upgrades, and service contracts, and daily operations of our technology platforms. In this application, we are seeking financial support for: i) the training of HQPs —one of the most important missions of the Centre—; ii) development and operation of novel and unique integrated optical systems; iii) big-data and image/signal analysis.