The Neuroscape Alliance mission is to foster collaboration, share technology and resources, and refine our collective vision to result in greater global impact.
The Neuroscape Alliance is an affiliation of academic institutions, clinical centers, and research facilities around the world that share a common vision of leveraging new, non-invasive technology to advance translational neuroscience research. We strive to develop novel assessments and interventions with applications to education, wellness and medicine.
Current Affiliates:
- University of Nice Sophia Antipolis – COBTEK IA [Nice, France]
- Center Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV) – NeuroTech [Lausanne, Switzerland]
- Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at UCSF [San Francisco, USA]
- Technion- Israel Institute of Technology – Educational Neuroimaging Center [Haifa, Israel]
- UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital [San Francisco, USA]
- University of Glasgow – Social Brain in Action Laboratory [Glasgow, United Kingdom]
- The University of Texas at Dallas – Center for BrainHealth [Dallas, USA]
- Monash University – The Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health [Melbourne, Australia]
- BrainPark
- University of California, Santa Cruz – ASSIST Lab [Santa Cruz, USA]
With Neuroscape at UCSF acting as a hub, Alliance members receive the following benefits:
- Participate in fellowship exchange programs
- Establish Neuroscape Research Labs (NRLs)
- Share software/ games
- Annual meeting
- Quarterly video conferences
- Leverage access to new technologies
- Access new funding opportunities
- Shared wiki/ website
- Provide/ receive technical support
- Share best practices for study design
- Perform multi-site clinical trials (study cultural influences)
University of Nice (France) – CoBTeK
The goals of CoBTeK – IA are:
- to develop clinical and translational research using ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) in order to prevent, help diagnose, and assist patients suffering from neuropsychiatric and neuro-developmental disorders
- to promote innovation and research on the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of neuropsychiatric diseases and neuro-developmental disorders
- to develop knowledge on the use of information and communications technology in neuropsychiatric disorders and neuro-developmental disorders
Neuroscape and CoBTeK-IA plan to collaborate on research projects, share knowledge, exchange students, and work together to develop a network of research labs involved in the field of neuroscience, technology and human sciences.
University Hospital of Lausanne (Switzerland) – NeuroTech
NeuroTech is the first of its kind in Europe and has been developed by the Department of Clinical Neuroscience (DNC) at the CHUV, the Lausanne University Hospital. NeuroTech promotes clinical neuroscience and neurotechnology research and represents an in-house infrastructure for all the specialties and units of the DNC: i.e. neurology, brain and spinal surgery, the Leenaards Memory Center and neurorehabilitation.
Cognition and Cognitive Neurorehabilitation are major domains of NeuroTech, driven by:
- assessment of behavioral and physiological factors underlying brain plasticity and cognitive recovery, and their accessibility for intervention
- development of ICT-based approaches to cognitive diagnostics and neurorehabilitation, inspired by models from cognitive and computational neuroscience
- brain imaging and neural stimulation to foster recovery of cognitive, affective, social and behavioral function in patients with neurological, neurosurgical and neuropsychiatric conditions, and cognitive disorders due to neurodegeneration
Neuroscape and NeuroTech will collaborate on research projects, share knowledge, exchange students, and work together to develop a network of research labs involved in the field of neuroscience, novel technologies and human sciences. The NeuroTech facilities and infrastructure will help to further promote assessment, evolution and implementation of clinical neuroscience approaches developed within Neuroscape.
Israel Institute of Technology (Israel) – Educational Neuroimaging Center
The Educational NeuroImaging Center (ENIC) at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology is focused on determining the neuronal, cognitive, genetic, and environmental components that underlie both the typical and atypical development of the most important components of communication in children: language and reading.
Our research focuses on several domains:
- Characterization of the underlying neuronal, cognitive, environmental, and genetic causes for language and reading difficulties in children suffering from these difficulties, such as in children with dyslexia, attention difficulties hyperactive disorder (ADHD), epilepsy, auditory-processing disorders, specific language impairments, psychiatric disorders, and more, through examination of the typical pathways of language and reading development in healthy children
- Treatment for children with language and reading difficulties using a variety of intervention programs
- Prevention of language and reading difficulties in all children
- To objectively pinpoint the neural circuits related to language and reading, we use a variety of neuroimaging techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), eye-tracking, and transcranial direct-current stimulation (tDCS). Using multi-modality analysis methods, we combine functional and structural connectivity datasets with behavioral and genetic data to establish a holistic understanding of the basis of language and reading difficulties.
UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital (California)
UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco
Ranked as one of the top children’s hospitals in the nation by US News & World Report, UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco has more than 150 specialists in more than 40 areas of children’s health. Our Mission Bay Children’s Hospital opened on Febuary 1st 2015 with 183 pediatric beds and is San Francisco’s only designated children’s hospital. Our hospital opened with leading-edge technology, like robotic “TUGs” that deliver meals and medications as well as an advanced clinical communication solution. Patient’s rooms are equipped with an interactive patient engagement system that provides entertainment, education and meal ordering.Children’s Hospital leadership has a commitment to technology that is designed to improve patient care. Being in the heart of Silicon Valley we are ideally situated to leverage high tech companies to meet that commitment.
University of Glasgow – Social Brain in Action Laboratory
One of the most exciting and rapidly evolving areas of human-technology interaction concerns the rise of socially assistive and companion robots. The potential to effortlessly interact with physically present robots presents a wealth of challenges and opportunities for enhancing our lives at home, as well as in business, education, and healthcare settings. Understanding how we perceive and interact with others is a core challenge of social cognition research. Work being performed by the Social Robots team as part of the Social Brain in Action laboratory, and supported by the European Research Council, draws upon psychology, cognitive neuroscience and social robotics with the aim to:
- Establish a new approach for understanding how the human brain processes and responds to interactive robots;
- Determine how long-term experience shapes brain and behavioural responses to social interactions with robots across time; and
- Explore how these findings can inform the now-rapid development of social robots
To achieve these aims, the team is working to examine how healthy young adults perceive and interact with humans compared to robots, with particular focus on the impact of a robot’s perceived emotions and the quality of social engagement with the robot that participants report. One question we are looking to answer in particular is the extent to which brain regions that have evolved over millennia to mediate social interaction with humans might also be recruited to support social exchanges with artificial agents. Future work will further test the role of experience-dependent plasticity on social cognition by assessing the neurocognitive profiles of young children and older adults when interacting with socially engaging robots. Furthermore, we plan to explore how cultural influences shape social behaviour towards and neurocognitive representations of robots by extending aspects of this research to robotics-savvy individuals in Japan, the world’s most robotics-rich nation.
The University of Texas at Dallas (Texas) – Center for BrainHealth
The Center for BrainHealth leads scientific research to discover and implement proactive ways to build a stronger, faster, higher performing brain. The BrainHealth Team – comprised of 125+ scientists and research clinicians – is dedicated to empowering people of all ages to unlock their brain potential. We are establishing evidenced-based protocols to:
- Measure the brain getting healthier
- Enhance brain resilience
- Protect brain performance
- Rewire brain systems
We measure brain health through 5 domains – neural, cognitive, psychological well-being, independent life function and social cognition.
To overcome our impatience of scientific discoveries taking 15+ years to be converted into practices that benefit human life, the Center for BrainHealth created the Brain Performance Institute in 2013 (Director: Leanne Young, Ph.D.). We are rapidly developing real-time gaming platforms for social cognitive skills training, biometric data collection in virtual reality environments, neurostimulation and much more, to transform and scale our research translational efforts.
Our current efforts in bridging the gap between neuroscience and technology include:
- The BrainHealth Movement –We are launching the world’s first global brain health platform that delivers web-based, individualized and coach-monitored cognitive trainings. We will have the largest repository of brain health-focused measures in the world. Gaining a clearer understanding of the power of enhanced brain performance to mitigate the threat of declining brain health is vital to our world economy and well-being.
- Online BrainHealth Physicals – We provide a research-based annual assessment of brain performance with individualized recommendations for improvement focused on higher order frontal lobe skills, including innovation, synthesized reasoning capacity and strategic thinking.
- Charisma Social Cognition Program – (Director: Lara Ashmore, Ph.D.) Charisma is our VR platform which has been developed, tested and refined to enhance brain health and especially social cognition and social anxiety. Charisma offers a video-game like experience that helps individuals with social cognition or cultural adjustment challenges practice and improve skills through live, networked interactions with our expert clinicians in order to reduce vulnerabilities in both pediatric and adult populations. Research finds that Charisma achieves significant and rapid gains in neural health, social cognition and real life function in children and adults with high functioning autism. We anticipate the ability to transform access and delivery to trainings in the near future for those on the autism spectrum, social anxiety, or those in need of cultural expertise to mention a few areas to explore.
We embrace the Neuroscape Alliance’s opportunities to foster rich collaborations to achieve global progress. Brain health is one of the most fertile and vital fields of scientific exploration and application to improve humanity through our technological advances.
Monash University (Australia) – The Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health
The Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health; one of Australia’s largest institutes for mental health, unites over 200 world-class researchers with cutting-edge research infrastructure. This is thanks to the generosity of the late David Winston Turner, who has presented Monash University with Australia’s largest single gift to mental health. Through this gift, we are one step closer to providing ground-breaking research, training and treatment solutions for mental health conditions. We are laying the foundations for a pipeline of discovery in areas of critical importance to human well-being: attention and memory, sleep, and addiction. Through the institutes knowledge-sharing program, we will ensure these findings are disseminated throughout the neuroscience community, and beyond to inform public debate, enrich our culture, and actively involve the public in the discovery process. We are also creating structures, culture and connections to more rapidly turn the knowledge we generate into benefits to the community, such as improving prospects for recovery from drug addiction or head injury, enhancing learning in schools or reducing accidents in the workplace.
BrainPark is a new, research-driven solution to fast-track knowledge from the brain sciences into the community and help improve brain health of Australians.
BrainPark will utilise the latest knowledge in brain sciences to develop lifestyle and technology-based interventions to help those experiencing substance and behavioural addictions (e.g., alcohol and gambling) and other compulsive conditions (e.g., OCD), or those who are at risk of them. Through BrainPark, the team will develop five integrated interventions chosen for their strong therapeutic potential and accessibility. These are Virtual Reality, Physical exercise, Mindfulness meditation and Yoga, Non-invasive brain stimulation and Cognitive training.
University of California, Santa Cruz (California) – The Assistive Sociotechnical Solutions for Individuals with Special needs using Technology (ASSIST) Lab
University of California, Santa Cruz – ASSIST Lab
Director: Sri Kurniawan
Our lab develops human-centered games, virtual reality systems and interactive media to maintain and improve health and wellbeing of people with special needs, including older adults, people with disabilities, and people with low socioeconomic and educational backgrounds.