Yale Gets Grant for Project To Create Software Tools for Neuroscientists

New Haven, Conn. — Yale University is one of five recipients of a $10 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to enhance informatics research tools for neuroscientists around the world.

The five-year grant administered by the University of California-San Diego is to develop the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF), a dynamic inventory of highly diverse web-based data, resources and tools needed for cutting-edge research on normal and disordered nervous function. Other members of the consortium are California Institute of Technology, Washington University and George Mason University.

The SenseLab group at Yale for the past 15 years has provided web-accessible databases and tools for integrating data about nerve cells and brain circuits, says Gordon Shepherd, professor of neurobiology, who will test the NIF system to ensure it meets the broad needs of the 35,000 members of the Society for Neuroscience.

The NIF was launched in 2005 as part of the National Institutes of Health’s Blueprint for Neuroscience Research to integrate research data.

Perry Miller and Luis Marenco at the Yale Center for Medical Informatics will use the NIF funds to develop software tools that will enable investigators to access, retrieve and integrate data about genes, physiology, anatomy, pharmacology and brain scans.

Also working on the NIF project from the Yale Center for Medical Informatics are Rixin Wang, Yuli Li and Peter Masiar.