The long-term goal of the COBRE Center for Central Nervous System Function is to develop a neuroscience research center that provides research support to a wide array of neuroscience researchers at Brown University and its affiliated hospitals and the Rhode Island neuroscience research community. Since we began our COBRE in 2013, we have supported 13 Project Leaders and nine Pilot Project Leaders as they developed their research and academic careers. Collectively, our supported cohort has been awarded nearly 20 R01 or equivalent research grants, which along with other awarded grants has yielded more than $50 million in external funding. Grants relevant to our COBRE received by members of our Research Cores have totaled another $4 million. Of the 11 Project Leaders who served two or more years, nine have successfully graduated, with a tenth having received positive reviews of an R01 grant proposal. Collectively, our COBRE supported scientists have published nearly 130 peer-reviewed papers citing COBRE support and more than 400 papers overall. These papers have appeared in prestigious journals, including Nature Human Behavior, Current Biology, Neuron, eLife, PLoS Computational Biology, Journal of Neuroscience and other field-specific journals. We have developed a research core to assist our community in best practices for experimental design and data analysis. The main objective for Phase 3 COBRE support relates to building-out our research core to serve the needs of the neuroscience community at Brown and Rhode Island and also to expand and strengthen our Pilot Project Program. We will enhance the scope of our Research Core by integrating two existing neuroscience core facilities, the MRI Research Facility and the Rodent Behavior Phenotyping Core, into one administrative entity. Additionally, we will partner with service cores of other local COBREs and those at Brown-affiliated hospitals to broaden our service outreach. Our vision is that by sustaining and transitioning the established research infrastructure into an integrated entity, we will enable neuroscientists to conduct their work more effectively and efficiently.

This COBRE Center will support research focusing on central nervous system function in healthy humans, those with brain disorders and pre-clinical model systems through the activities of the administrative and a research core. The Pilot Project Program will provide resources to early stage investigators and also to established investigators who propose novel lines of inquiry. Overall, the COBRE Center will help facilitate neuroscience research in the Rhode Island community, with collective outcomes that bear upon brain health throughout the United States.