News and Information
Emory University
Atlanta, GA 30322

Release date: Sept. 29, 1999
Contact: Kate Egan, Chief of Public Affairs, 404-727-7709, or kegan@emory.edu

Multi-million Dollar Grant Creates Behavioral Neuroscience Center

A consortium of more than 60 neuroscientists at Emory University, Georgia State University, Georgia Institute of Technology and Atlanta University Center has been approved to become one of five new Science and Technology Centers (STC) established nationwide by the National Science Foundation.

Thomas Insel, director of the Yerkes Primate Research Center and architect and principal investigator of the grant, will serve as director of the newly created Center for Behavioral Neuroscience. Co-directors are Elliott Albers, director of the Center for Brain Sciences and Health, Georgia State University; and Patricia A. Marsteller, director of the Hughes Undergraduate Science Initiative at Emory. The final award amount is expected to be $15-20 million over the next five years. Based on dollars per year, the STC award is believed to be the largest ever received through Emory, which will share funding with its partners in the consortium.

Michael Johns, executive vice president for health affairs at Emory, says the grant also represents one of the largest collaborative proposals and some of the most generous in-kind contributions he has ever seen, with funds from the state and schools for personnel and equipment.

The new center will attempt to discover how brain mechanisms regulate complex social behaviors and emotions, and conversely, how social experience may sculpt the developing brain. Scientists will study behaviors such as fear, affiliation, aggression and reproductive behaviors at the molecular, cellular and systems levels in diverse species and at different stages of development. This is the first interdisciplinary effort of this magnitude addressing these fundamental questions, and will involve the application and development of powerful new technologies.

The full story is available on the web at www.emory.edu/WHSC/YERKES/newsroom/nsf_990806.html.

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