Rhode Island COBRE Center for Central Nervous System Function: Progress and Perspectives

The Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) Center for Central Nervous System Function (CCNSF) was funded in 2013 by the National Institute for General Medical Sciences to establish a collaborative environment for basic and applied research in higher nervous system function with humans and experimental animal model systems. Since its inception, the COBRE CCNSF has funded junior faculty investigators as Project and Pilot Project Leaders and one established investigator on projects investigating fundamental properties of nervous system function using a range of tools spanning molecular genetics, neurophysiology, invasive and non-invasive brain stimulation, behavior and neuroimaging. The Administrative Core facilitates all Center activities with a focus on career development, grant proposal submission, and deployment of technology developed by our research cores. The Design and Analysis Core aims to provide principled study design expertise, statistical modeling, machine learning, inference, and computation. The Behavior and Neuroimaging Core provides project-specific collaboration and support to COBRE scientists to promote the acquisition of high quality behavioral, physiological, neuroimaging and neurostimulation data, to ensure the integrity of the data collection infrastructure and to help implement robust data processing and visualization pipelines. While the cores principally serve Center scientists, our Center and the core resources have availability to all Rhode Island researchers.