This award provides a state of the art MRI scanners, such as the SIEMENS PRISMA magnetic resonance imager to the Rutgers University Newark. This model has ultra-fast collection times in 100s of milliseconds and sharp detail in (0.1mm) spatial resolution. The combination of these features and many other recent innovations in MRI will provide for novel research and fundamental breakthroughs in brain research, impacting on the characterization and basic understanding of mental health disease (e.g. Schziophrenia, Depression, Autism) as well as furthering more general understanding of areal connectivity within the human brain.
RUBIC is a core research center for all Rutgers campuses and a regional resource for institutions and research groups throughout the northeast corridor. Specific areas of research are immediately enabled by the PRISMA and other core areas are strengthened. These research areas include (1) Human connectome research and network neuroscience, (2) Decision science and reward learning (3). Basic research on Alzheimer's and characterization of various types of dementia. RUBIC has 25-30 PI researchers in any given research cycle, and has an active growing community of researchers at RUTGERS and in nearby institutions.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
