IUCRC: Planning Grant: Georgia Institute of Technology: Center For Building Reliable Advances and Innovation in Neurotechnology (BRAIN)

Disorders of the brain are the leading cause of disability in the United States. There is a critical need for new technology to address this problem. However, creating the technology calls for very collaborative efforts between academic researchers with unique technical expertise and industry companies with deep product development expertise.

The Georgia Tech site of the Building Reliable Advances and Innovations in Neurotechnology (BRAIN) Center will develop product-ready technology innovations that prevent brain disorders and provide better diagnosis and treatment for affected patients. The Georgia Tech site will also initiate new industry-focused programs promoting diversity and education.

Building the aforementioned technologies requires fundamental understanding of the brain, which is limited by the state-of-the-art in basic science and engineering. Understanding is advancing through innovative research; however, research impact is currently limited because innovation greatly outpaces productization due to insufficient shepherding of innovation through the “valley of death” in the translational pipeline.

To address this shortcoming, the Georgia Tech BRAIN Center site will develop product-ready neurotechnology innovations by spanning science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, model systems (e.g., human, animal, in vitro, and computational), spatial scales (i.e., neuron to organism), and brain function verticals (e.g., neurovascular and neurological).

Another thrust area of the Georgia Tech site is Neuroethics. Emerging neurotechnologies present enormous ethical implications relating to autonomy, identity, and privacy. We assert that the integration of neuroethics into BRAIN Center activities is critical to maximizing broader impacts such as social benefit, acceptance, trust, and justice in neurotechnology innovation.

Another broader impact of the Georgia Tech site will be combatting underrepresentation in STEM fields. Located in Atlanta, which is home to a majority Black population, Georgia Tech has a unique opportunity to leverage its place toward this end through the vehicles of entrepreneurship and internships.

Data products to result from the proposed planning grant may include experimental, computational, text-based, and/or curricular data. All digital data products will be stored in compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act, and the final HIPAA Omnibus rule.

Further, these products will be accessible only through user-specific password-protected access. All archived materials will be retained for a period of five years. A landing page for navigation to archived data has already been created at http://sites.gatech.edu/avl/iucrc.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.