Huib Mansvelder, professor and head of the department of Integrative Neurophysiology at VU Amsterdam, received the prestigious European Research Council Advanced Grant this week. This is the largest personal research grant in Europe.

The American National Institute of Health will fund new brain research of three CNCR researchers at VU Amsterdam through the so-called Brain Initiative programme. Brain research is desperately needed to better understand and treat brain diseases.

The performance of CNCR researchers Rachel Brouwer, Loek van der Kallen and Mahesh Karnani has been evaluated positively and we are happy to announce that they are rewarded a permanent employment contract.

The new joint degree program (linked to the Master of Neurosciences program at BETA-CNCR & VUmc) receives 6-year funding from the European Erasmus Mundus program of Erasmus+.

Rik van der Kant, Natalia Goriounova and Priyanka Rao-Ruiz, researchers at the Center for Neurogenomics & Cognitive Research at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, have been awarded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) with a Vidi grant worth 800,000 euros.

Dr. Christiaan de Kock awarded Open Competition ENW-M-2 grant (700k€) to study multisensory processing in primary visual cortex.

Teams at the VU Amsterdam, Heidelberg University, Center of Advanced European Studies and Research (Bonn) and Max Planck Institute for Neurobiology (Martinsried) achieve next step in understanding how sensory information is represented across different cell-types of primary somatosensory (barrel) cortex of behaving rats. Their findings were published in Communications Biology.

The group of Klaus Linkenkaer-Hansen (INF) established a method to estimate excitation/inhibition balance using the theory of critical brain dynamics. By teaming up with the group of Hilgo Bruining (Amsterdam UMC), the method is validated for physiological stratification of autism spectrum disorder.

Biomarker integration for better clinical decision making

Arthur-Ervin Avramiea, Richard Hardstone and colleagues from the team of Klaus Linkenkaer-Hansen (INF) publish in eLife that pre-stimulus phase and amplitude regulation of stimulus processing is maximized when neuronal networks operate in the critical state.