Next Generation Networks For Neuroscience | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) funding opportunity titled "Next Generation Networks for Neuroscience" (Funding Opportunity Number 16-569) is a discretionary grant program designed to accelerate major advances in how scientists study and understand the brain. The solicitation is rooted in the idea that brain science has reached a point where better instruments, richer datasets, and more powerful computational methods are not enough on their own. What is needed next is coordinated, interdisciplinary team science that connects experimental work with theory and computation, and that can link neural activity to cognition and behavior across different biological levels, time and space scales, environments, and species (including humans). NSF frames this as part of a larger national push to build shared, accessible capabilities that function like a coherent research infrastructure for neuroscience, aligning with the "Understanding the Brain" activity and NSF's role in the broader BRAIN Initiative.

At its core, the program aims to fund projects that develop and disseminate two major kinds of outputs. First, it seeks innovative research resources, instrumentation, and neurotechnologies. These can include new tools for measuring, manipulating, or analyzing neural activity and behavior, especially tools that enable researchers to work at finer temporal or spatial resolution, operate in more naturalistic or socially relevant environments, or bridge lab and real-world contexts. The emphasis is not just on inventing a tool, but on building something that can be shared, adopted, and scaled by a wider community. Second, the solicitation places equal weight on theoretical frameworks that can organize and explain brain function across organizational levels (for example, molecules to circuits to systems to behavior), across different analytic scales, and across diverse species that may be especially informative for specific neuroscience questions. NSF explicitly notes the value of theoretical perspectives, including evolutionary frameworks, to help connect findings across species and contexts rather than treating each dataset as isolated.

A defining feature of this opportunity is its focus on networks and integration rather than single-lab, narrowly scoped advances. NSF describes a vision of a connected portfolio of transformative projects that create synergistic links across investigators and communities. In practice, this means proposals are expected to show strong interdisciplinary collaboration and a credible plan for how the resulting technologies or theories will be disseminated and used beyond the proposing team. The program is meant to push the field toward shared platforms, shared methods, and shared conceptual foundations that allow neuroscience to move faster and with more coherence, especially when trying to connect neural activity to complex cognition and behavior "in action and in context."

The solicitation is open in terms of applicant eligibility (listed as unrestricted, meaning any entity may apply as long as it meets any additional requirements described in the full text). It is funded as a grant under NSF's research and development activity categories, with CFDA numbers 47.041, 47.049, 47.074, and 47.075. The original and current closing date for this specific opportunity was October 21, 2016, and NSF anticipated making around 15 awards. While the award ceiling is not specified in the provided summary fields, the overall intent is clear: support ambitious, high-impact efforts that provide broadly usable neurotechnologies and/or widely applicable theoretical frameworks, paired with real mechanisms for sharing, training, and community uptake.

In short, Next Generation Networks for Neuroscience is NSF's push to build the next layer of national capacity in brain research: new shared tools and new shared theories, developed through interdisciplinary collaboration, explicitly aimed at transforming how researchers link neural activity to cognition and behavior across species, settings, and scales, and designed from the beginning for dissemination and broad training impact.

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