NSF is uniquely positioned to foster BRAIN Initiative research by bringing together a wide range of scientific and engineering disciplines from national and international communities.

NSF empowers those communities to cooperatively pursue and reveal the fundamental principles and processes underlying memories, thoughts and complex behaviors. The NSF BRAIN Initiative aims to generate an array of physical and conceptual tools needed to determine how healthy brains function over the lifespan of humans and other organisms; and to develop a workforce to create and implement these tools to establish a more comprehensive understanding of how thoughts, memories and actions emerge from the dynamic activities in the brain.

About NSF

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent federal agency created by Congress in 1950 “to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense…” With an annual budget of $7.5 billion (FY 2016), we are the funding source for approximately 24 percent of all federally supported basic research conducted by America’s colleges and universities. In many fields such as mathematics, computer science and the social sciences, NSF is the major source of federal backing.