Wellcome Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging

Understanding how interactions between neurons generate human behaviour, why individual brains vary from one another, or whether a patient is likely to develop a particular disease, requires explanations that span vast differences in scale. Yet such explanations are essential if insights from neuroscience are to make a meaningful impact on human health. Precise mechanisms discovered in animal models must be related to clinical phenotypes discovered through population studies; both must be combined to improve diagnosis and treatment in individual patients. Neuroimaging offers a powerful route to connect these different scales, providing measurements that are sensitive to cellular phenomena and that can be acquired in living humans. The WT Centre for Integrative Neuroimaging will enable novel insights into brain function that span levels of description, and therefore bridge the gap between laboratory neuroscience and human health. This will require fundamental discoveries concerning relationships between species and between scales, and major technological developments for mapping big-data discoveries onto neurobiological mechanisms. We will bring together diverse investigators who can tackle different themes within this grand challenge. Within each theme, neuroimaging will be used alongside complementary methodologies, ensuring that it takes inspiration from, and has impact on, areas beyond its typical reach.