PI: Ben Greenberg, MD, PhD
Co-PI: Linda Carpenter, MD
A 2018 NIGMS award to Butler Hospital established its new Center of Biomedical Research Excellence (COBRE) focused on Neuromodulation. Butler’s CCN includes multidisciplinary clinical neuromodulation research activities, all of which involve brain stimulation and readouts of circuit activity in clinical or clinically-relevant populations.
The CCN supports projects and project leaders lending themselves to close scientific collaboration and technical links, with mentoring to facilitate their growth towards independent scientific careers. To accomplish this, the Center establishes a platform for interchange of scientific insights and technical skills. We also include a robust pilot project award program to meet the need for a sustainable pipeline of researchers in clinical neuromodulation. The CCN focuses on neuropsychiatric illness with the guiding principle that for noninvasive brain stimulation to gain in clinical efficacy and implementation, it is imperative to better characterize clinically-relevant target circuits and mechanisms of action.
The CCN unites and supports a group of highly promising early-career investigators as COBRE Project Leaders (PLs) in neuromodulation investigations in clinical and clinically-relevant populations. The CCN includes (1) a Design and Analysis Core (DAC) to support rigorous and innovative experimental design and data analytic strategies; (2) a Neuroimaging and Neuromodulation Core (NNC) to facilitate the acquisition and processing of high-quality data using noninvasive neurostimulation and neuroimaging methods; (3) an Administrative Core to oversee and coordinate mentoring and related activities to propel development of investigators towards independence. The CCN identifies and promotes the success of new neuromodulation scientists through recruitment of new PLs and through its Pilot Project program, integrating the resources of the DAC and NNC research cores.