The Austrian Science Fund (FWF) has awarded a Cluster of Excellence Grant to “Neuronal Circuits in Health and Disease”.
“Neuronal Circuits in Health and Disease”, a consortium directed by Tibor Harkany at the Medical University of Vienna, and co-coordinated IMBA Group Leader Noelia Urbán, is one of the two new Clusters of Excellence funded through the Excellent=Austria initiative. The 21-million-euro funding provided by the Ministery of Education, Science and Research through the FWF will support a collaborative effort by over thirty research teams in Austria to study the development and function of inhibitory neurons in the brain and uncover their role in neuronal diseases such as schizophrenia, autism and epilepsy.
Coordinating Team:
- Tibor Harkany, Director of Research, Medical University of Vienna
- Peter Jonas, Deputy Director of Research, ISTA
- Noelia Urban Avellaneda, Deputy Director of Research, IMBA, ÖAW
- Francesco Ferraguti, Member of the Board of Director, Meduni Innsbruck
- Gaia Novarino, Member of the Board of Director, ISTA
- Thomas Klausberger, Member of the Board of Director, Medical University of Vienna
- Elly M. Tanaka, Member of the Board of Director, IMBA
- Manuel Zimmer, Member of the Board of Director, IMP, Uni Vienna
“We are extremely happy that, thanks to the cluster, we will be able to capitalize on the strong neuroscience community in Austria to foster interactions and generate synergies among them. We look forward to educating and transferring our knowledge to the next generation of scientists in the country and beyond,” says Noelia Urbán.
The brain is the most complex and sophisticated organ of the human body. Therefore, understanding brain function is not only the most difficult scientific challenge for humans, but also follows the quest to rationalize consciousness, the “human self”, maximize performance and provide templates for all those disciplines that use the human brain as a model. The new Cluster of Excellence aims to create a comprehensive understanding of how different types of inhibitory neurons - essential cellular nodes of any neural network - develop and interact to control circuit operations that underlie behavior, and how they are susceptible to diseases such as schizophrenia, autism and epilepsy. The results of this research could pave the way for the development of personalized drug therapies to alleviate mental illness.
