The Allen Institute is launching a new neuroscience research division.
The Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics, which launched Thursday, will focus on how mammalian brains solve problems and make decisions. It is the Seattle institute's fifth division, and it will work closely with the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
“We still do not understand how neurons in multiple brain areas work together to produce interesting behavior. This is a very challenging problem that needs to be pursued at a scale and with a level of long-term support not possible in most academic laboratories, making it the perfect project for the Allen Institute to tackle,” Michael Stryker, a neuroscientist and member of the Allen Institute's board of directors and scientific advisory board, said in a news release.
Karel Svoboda will take the reins of the new division as its executive director and vice president. Svoboda, according to the Allen Institute, has spent the past 15 years as a senior group leader at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus. He has also been on the Allen Institute for Brain Science's scientific advisory councils for more than 10 years.
The neuroscience division will study lab mice and food foraging to learn more about the brain. According to the Allen Institute, decision-making in food foraging mirrors economic decision-making, and deficits in foraging tie to disorders like major depressive disorder and attention deficit disorder.
“Mammals are implicitly fantastic statisticians — they explore their environments in near-optimal ways and employ sophisticated inference about risks and rewards. In a situation like foraging, they learn much faster than any kind of algorithm that artificial intelligence would throw at a similar problem,” Svoboda said in a news release. “There's something about the structure of neural circuits that has evolved to implement that quick learning, and that’s what we’d like to discover.”
The Allen Institute is a nonprofit founded in 2003 by Paul Allen, Microsoft's co-founder. In addition to the neural dynamics and brain science divisions, the Allen Institute's divisions include the Allen Institute for Cell Science, the Allen Institute for Immunology and the Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group.
