The mission of Princeton's Center for the Study of Brain, Mind and Behavior (CSBMB) is to support multidisciplinary research on the neural mechanisms underlying mental function. Center researchers come from a variety of disciplines, including mathematics, physics, chemistry, engineering, neuroscience and psychology. A primary focus of their work has been the use of fMRI to study the pattern and dynamics of brain activity associated with mental functions such as visual perception, attention, working memory, long term episodic memory, and decision making. CSBMB investigators have been at the forefront of this field, including the development of new methods for analyzing fMRI data. For example, they have led the development of multivariate methods of pattern analysis, and have demonstrated their ability to distinguish between cognitive states not possible using standard methods of analysis. These new methods require larger datasets, and substantial expansion of the raw data, placing increasingly heavy demands on computational resources. At the same time, growing interest in these efforts has attracted additional investigators to the CSBMB and its facilities. This has been further accelerated by the recent formation of Princeton's Neuroscience Institute and its plans for faculty expansion. These developments are placing strains on the CSBMB's computing facilities, the current limits of which are beginning to constrain the research efforts of CSBMB investigators. In this proposal, we request support to expand this facility by substantially increasing the storage capacity of its file server, and upgrading bandwidth on network connections used to access this server. The CSBMB and the University have committed to match these requests with an expansion of the memory for the CSBMB compute server, and to continue to cover all expenses for the maintenance and support of this computing facility. ? ? Work supported by the CSBMB aims to deepen our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying mental functions that are disturbed in a wide range of clinical conditions, including depression, anxiety disorders, schizophrenia, neurological impairments, aging, and drug addiction. CSBMB investigators are supported, in this work, by grants from a number of NIH institutes, including NIMH, NINDS, NIDA, NIA and NIE. Progress in this work promises to lead to more sophisticated and more effective approaches to the diagnosis, treatment and ultimately cure of mental disease, in just the way that our understanding of basic mechanisms of cardiovascular function have led to more sophisticated and effective treatment of heart disease. The current proposal will support the research efforts of CSBMB investigators by providing them with the technological infrastructure necessary to pursue more sophisticated neuroimaging studies, to conduct more detailed analyses of the data they generate, and to construct more realistic models of neural function used to interpret these findings. ? ? ?
