Democratizing Access to the Technology of Neuroscience

BRAIN计划的成功将取决于广泛获得该计划所创造的技术进步、计算工具和数据集。然而，目前还没有任何机制为国家提供越来越多的以技术和计算为导向的大脑研究。进入的障碍既有财政上的，也有结构上的：技术密集型的神经科学不仅成本高昂，而且需要对物理学、工程学和计算机科学进行投资，这超出了单个实验室的范围。这阻碍了社区有效利用现有技术能力，并限制了将推动下一代创新的问题和假设。因此，有必要消除一小部分开发和利用最新技术的实验室与剩下的大多数神经科学家之间不断扩大的差距。成功消除差距将需要一个先进的国家信息交换所，以确保正确的物理学，工程学和计算机科学工具得到审查，并可免费获得大脑结构和功能的测量。这些目标的成功实现将需要一个迭代的过程，在这个过程中，神经科学界的特定需求将被确定，并与适当的科学，技术和计算资源配对，或者为未来的潜在创新提供管道。该项目的运作模式将是一个用户设施，设在阿贡国家实验室（ANL），并利用其科学设施的现有资源。该奖项为基础设施开发、会议、教育和推广提供种子赠款。该团队将招募生命系统物理学社区，特别是其中的年轻科学家，通过连接到由NSF物理前沿理论生物物理中心领导的研究生研究网络，加入神经科学研究工作。为了吸引和培训广泛的社区，将举行几次年会，涵盖成像和定量神经科学的广泛主题。该团队将扩大由UC神经科学研究所运行的计划，向当地7/4年级学生教授神经科学。目标学校的几乎所有学生都是非洲裔美国人，住在当地的南区社区。ANL将通过自己的教育项目支持这一奋进，但这是第一次涉及神经科学技术。

The success of the BRAIN initiative will depend on widespread access to the technological advancements, computational tools, and data sets created by the initiative. However, there are no existing mechanisms for providing national access to the increasingly technologically and computationally oriented investigations of the brain. The barriers to entry are both financial and structural: not only is technologically intensive neuroscience costly, it requires an investment in physics, engineering and computer science beyond the scope of individual laboratories. This prevents the community's efficient utilization of current technological capabilities and limits the questions and hypotheses that will drive the next generation of innovation. Thus there is a need to counteract the widening gap between the small fraction of laboratories developing and utilizing the most recent technology and the remaining majority of neuroscientists. The successful removal of the gap will require a sophisticated national clearing house to ensure that the correct physics, engineering, and computer science tools are vetted and freely accessible for measurements of brain structure and functions. Successful accomplishment of these goals will require an iterative process whereby specific needs of the neuroscience community will be identified and either paired with the appropriate scientific, technological and computational resources or pipelined for potential future innovation. The model for the operation of this project will be a user facility, housed at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), and leveraging the existing resources of their science facilities. This award provides funding for seed grants for infrastructure development, conferences, education, and outreach.The team will enlist the Physics of Living Systems community, most specifically the young scientists therein, to join the neuroscience research effort by connecting to the graduate research network led by the NSF Physics Frontier Center for Theoretical Biological Physics. In order to engage and train a broad community, several annual conferences will be held that will cover a broad range of topics in imaging and quantitative neuroscience. The team will augment the program run by the UC Neuroscience Institute to teach Neuroscience to local 7th/4th graders. Almost all of the students in the target schools are African American and live in the local South Side community. ANL will partner with this endeavor by support through its own educational programs, but for the first time broaching the technology of neuroscience.