One of the world's foremost brain imaging research facilities has received a major boost after being awarded 6.74 million funding over five years by the Wellcome Trust. The former Functional Imaging Laboratory at University College London (UCL) is the recipient of a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award and becomes the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL.
The Strategic Award will further bolster the reputation of a laboratory already renowned for its research into the neural basis of human cognition, work which is extending our understanding of common neurological and psychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia and dementia.
"The human brain and human cognition are incredibly complex, and as such, understanding them requires not only state-of-the-art technology, but also a body of science with strong theoretical underpinnings," explains Professor Ray Dolan, Director of the laboratory. "Our goal at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL is to provide excellence in both these aspects of imaging neuroscience. This will enable us to study in depth the functional architecture of the human brain, with the ultimate objective of identifying the core mechanisms that cause common human neurological and psychiatric diseases."
Disorders of human brain function are a major source of human morbidity. Finding effective treatments for common expressions of human brain dysfunction, such as schizophrenia or dementia, poses major intellectual and technical challenges.
A lack of means to study the living human brain has historically been a major barrier to progress, but this is now less of a problem due to the availability of powerful non-invasive imaging tools such as functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). The WTCFN has three state of the art fMRI scanners and one MEG scanner.
"There has been formidable progress in understanding human brain function using fMRI and MEG techniques over t
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Contact: Craig Brierley
c.brierley@wellcome.ac.uk
44-207-611-7329
Wellcome Trust
27-Oct-2006