Bringing brains together to further neuroscience
Understanding the brain takes more than one researcher, one study or even one scientific discipline.
At Carnegie Mellon, understanding the brain means unifying faculty from across 18 departments under one roof: the Neuroscience Institute.
The institute, founded in 2018, brings together that interdisciplinary expertise to understand and improve brain function in both healthy and diseased brains, invent and apply the next generation of neural technologies and tools, and educate the next generation of neuroscience leaders.
“CMU excels in systems neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience and neuroengineering, as well as in developing neurotechnologies to advance science and to treat diseases of the brain,” said Barb Shinn-Cunningham, the institute’s founding director and current Glen de Vries Dean of the Mellon College of Science. “Before the Neuroscience Institute was created, we had our own research identity but did not have the tradition of working together across those boundaries because we lacked formal leadership to build the CMU brand.”
When she arrived at CMU in 2018, Shinn-Cunningham began working to consolidate neuroscience research from across the campus, including existing programs like BrainHub and the joint CMU/University of Pittsburgh Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. Once established, the institute was jointly run by Dietrich College and Mellon College of Science.
Beyond research innovation, the Neuroscience Institute educates next-generation leaders in the field through its doctoral programs. Ph.D. students in the Neuroscience Institute have an opportunity to rotate between labs and work with multiple faculty during their first year of study. This approach exposes students to different mentors and lab cultures, allowing them to find the best fit for their work style, a key factor to success and well-being.
“CMU is unique in that it fosters this kind of interdisciplinary work,” said Chiara Repetti-Ludlow, a distinguished post-doctoral fellow at the institute. “There are not many places (where a person) coming from a linguistics background with some neuroscience experience could just have free reign to do a project.”
Soon the institute will find a central headquarters in the new Richard King Mellon Hall of Science, which is currently under construction along Forbes Avenue. This new home will bring faculty closer together to improve communication, collaboration and creation. During the transition in leadership, current interim Director Timothy Verstynen said his goal is to keep the institute on track and amplify the joy in the work and in being a member of such a unique community.
“To do this work, I have to have expertise in computational neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, data science and machine learning and biology,” he said. “I cannot be an expert in all of those things, but if I collaborate with people who are, our shared expertise allows us to put together much bigger studies with greater depth than we could do if we were isolated and alone.”
