The National Institutes of Health (NIH), a part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, is the nation’s medical research agency — making important discoveries that improve health and save lives.
This grant program focuses on supporting the initial development of unique and innovative technologies for recording and/or modulation within the nervous system. It encourages the exploration of new ideas and untested concepts that could significantly enhance the capabilities for recording or modulation in terms of scale, precision, and selectivity. The grant is open to a wide array of modalities, including acoustic, chemical, electrical, magnetic, optical, and genetic tools, and it looks for projects that propose either invasive or non-invasive approaches. These approaches should aim at enabling large-scale recordings or precise manipulation of neural activity, with the ultimate goal of being compatible with human or animal behavior experiments. The program is inclusive of applicants from diverse fields beyond traditional neuroscience, such as chemistry, physics, engineering, theory, materials science, and more, emphasizing the program's interdisciplinary nature. It also mandates the inclusion of a Plan for Enhancing Diverse Perspectives (PEDP) in the application, which is critical for the proposal's evaluation process.