The National Institutes of Health calls it America’s next moonshot: a revolutionary, historic effort to view the human brain’s 86 billion neurons in action and transform our understanding of how we think, move, and perceive the world around us. Last year, in its first round of applications, the NIH’s Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) awarded $46 million in grants, and when the winners of the second round are announced later this spring, SUNY College of Optometry Professor Jose-Manuel Alonso and SUNY Polytechnic Institute Professor of Nanoscale Engineering Ji Ung Lee hope their names will be on the list.

“There’s a major emphasis coming from the NIH to improve the tools we have to study the brain, and there are many labs trying to come up with better probes that can be inserted into the brain,” says Jose-Manuel Alonso, MD, Professor at SUNY College of Optometry in New York City. “The traditional approach is to make the probe really thin at the tip, which minimizes any potential damage, and thick at the top, which keeps the probe from breaking. But there are still problems with that approach, and we think we have the solution.”

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Posted: March 19, 2015