Sector development

Alongside our support of research activities, we have invested in a number of strategic programmes to develop the wider neuroscience sector. These range from funding symposia series to building the capacity of organisations representing neuroscience interests.

Rather than many one-off or ad hoc meetings, we provide support to a small number of high calibre symposia series that overlap with our broad interests in circuits and behaviour, theory and computation as well as the theory-expeirment interplay. Providing funding for a series allows the organisers to forward plan and deliver more interesting and useful meetings. We currently support the AREADNE, Ascona and Cosyne meetings.

In collaboration with Wellcome, we have partnered with The Royal College of Psychiatrists to run a five-year programme to transform psychiatric training in the UK by integrating modern neuroscience. This will mean the future generation of psychiatrists will be more aware of the exciting advances in basic and clinical neuroscience, so that they are better equipped to provide mental health care in the future. 

We are supporting the British Neuroscience Assocation to implement its new strategic plan. This is to recast the Assocation as a strong professional society for all of UK neuroscience, so as to be relevant not only to neuroscientists but also associated fields (neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, etc) in both universities and industry.

To provide state-of-the-art hands-on training courses in Europe to nurture the next generation of neuroscientists, we are working with the CAJAL Advanced Neuroscience Training Programme to develop further its offering of courses and to cement its position as a major training provider.