Hi MLE, 

As a follow up to last week's post, Kavli has written a lovely description of their logo, which we designed in addition to their site, and thought I'd share: 

"The Kavli NDI vision for understanding neuroscience and cognition emanates from fact the brain is comprised of individual cells patterned together to form neural network motifs. While each individuals brain architecture conserves some motifs, such as cortical columns, our brains are distinct in others, such as nuclei. Within these unique variances our brains reflect with exquiste complexity who we are as individuals. This notion is symbolically represented with our logo which is inspired by the Penrose tile. Penrose tiles are a set of simple shapes that can be organized to form infinitely non-repeating patterns into complex structures found both in design (e.g. architecture) and in nature (e.g. quasicrystals)."

About Kavli NDI

Have a great long weekend!

Suzan 

Hi MLE,

We just launched a new site and brand for the Kavli NDI Institute! 

The Kavli Foundation is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity, promoting public understanding of scientific research, and supporting scientists and their work.

Much like the Nobel Prize, the Kavli Prize is a prestigious prize awarded every year for advances in astrophysics, nanoscience and neuroscience, and is honoured by the US President at an Oval Office reception.

The Kavli Foundation is also actively involved in establishing research institutes at the best universities across the globe (e.g., MIT, Cambridge, Tokyo). Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore was one of the most recently awarded an institute, and the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute was launched this year.

In the last 25 years there has been an incredible expansion of knowledge regarding the molecular components of the brain, the development of remarkable new technologies to measure, image and manipulate the brain, as well as dramatic enhancement in computational capacities that give us the ability to define the structure, function and malleability of discrete brain circuits. One daunting aspect of this extraordinary opportunity in brain research is the sheer volume, variety, and complexity of modern neuroscientific data.  

Neuroscience still lacks effective tools for managing these massively large data sets. Kavli NDI researchers are filling this gap by finding new ways to organize, analyze, and extract meaning from neurodata. They plan to lead the transformation toward big data-driven neuroscience and in so doing accelerate the pace of discovery.

Answering the questions that are most important is no longer achievable by a single individual or lab, or even by a single department or center. Rather, novel insights will come from establishing deep, long-lasting, transdisciplinary collaborations that combine the efforts of scientists with diverse expertise to understand the emergent behaviors of systems as complex as the human brain.

The Kavli NDI mission is to advance neuroscience discovery by uniting neuroscience, engineering and computational data science to understand the structure and function of the brain.

www.kavlijhu.org

Suzan