Description

This NIH opportunity encourages multidisciplinary research to develop or apply new and innovative approaches for measuring brain activity, connectivity, genomics, or related aspects across the full age spectrum—from early neurodevelopment through aging. The overarching goal is to improve understanding of brain development and aging, including the neurodevelopmental origins of later health and disease. Projects may involve healthy human participants, clinical groups (e.g., with cognitive, motor, or affective regulation challenges), and/or animal models.

Research can focus on longitudinal or cross-sectional neuroanatomical or functional changes at any level, including genetics/genomics, single cells, connectomics, neural population activity, and more. The program seeks technological and conceptual innovation to improve repeated measures across longer epochs of the lifespan, enabling better prediction of outcomes at later ages.

All applications must include:

• A methods development aim (e.g., new hardware, software, or analytic tools)
• A hypothesis testing aim (demonstrating the relevance of the technical advance)
• At least two timepoints per participant or animal

Projects must demonstrate how the new methodology expands brain measurement capacity across the lifespan. Both human and animal studies are eligible, and parallel work in both is encouraged.