​​​​​​​BRAIN Multi-Council Working Group (MCWG) Meeting – May 2026

Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Multi-Council Working Group (MCWG) Meeting

May 8, 2026

On May 8, 2026, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative Multi-Council Working Group (MCWG) met virtually to discuss the state of the BRAIN Initiative and learn about new and upcoming projects.

Crystal L. Lantz, PhD, Designated Federal Official of MCWG, gave the welcome address. She provided an overview of the MCWG and presented the meeting agenda. Next, John Ngai, PhD, Director of the NIH BRAIN Initiative and Chair of the MCWG, shared BRAIN Initiative updates. He began by thanking the BRAIN Initiative staff in honor of Public Service Appreciation Week. Then Dr. Ngai provided an update on the BRAIN Initiative budget. He noted that the BRAIN Initiative’s 21^st Century Cures Act funding is scheduled to expire at the end of Fiscal Year (FY) 2026. The BRAIN Initiative base funding, as appropriated to its contributing NIH Institutes and Centers, is estimated to continue in FY 2027. He also shared recent accomplishments from BRAIN-funded investigators, including two recipients of the Wiley Prize in Biomedical Sciences, four investigators elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and five investigators elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Ngai shared highlights from recent BRAIN Initiative activities and events, including a site visit to the CONNECTS Program site at the Allen Institute, a Congressional Neuroscience Caucus briefing on securing America’s neurotechnology future, and a NeuroView publication [1] outlining a Neuroscience Research Roadmap, written by Dr. Ngai. He also shared the registration information for the 2026 BRAIN Initiative Conference, to be held at the Bethesda North Marriott, MD, on August 11 – 13, 2026, and invited everyone to register and attend.

Next, Dr. Ngai highlighted recent publications from BRAIN-funded investigators. One study [2] examined the neurobiological basis of mental imagery and showed that mental imagery reactivates the same sensory areas used to visualize stimuli. Another study [3] assessed the cerebellum’s contributions to language processing and its relationship with the neocortical language network.

Finally, Dr. Ngai shared updates on BRAIN Initiative funding opportunities. At present, the BRAIN Initiative has several active Notices of Funding Opportunities (NOFOs), including one recently published opportunity for exploratory and developmental studies on invasive neural recording and stimulation devices in the human brain, and eight forecasted opportunities. The BRAIN Initiative has also signed on to two Highlighted Topics, including one focused on bioethics research and one focused on quantum information science and technology for biomedical applications . Interested applicants can apply through an appropriate parent funding announcement and contact BRAIN Initiative staff to ensure that their application is properly tracked. All BRAIN Initiative funding opportunities can be found on grants.gov and on the NIH grants and funding webpage. Finally, Dr. Ngai encouraged attendees to provide input on the NIH Request for Information soliciting feedback on draft resources to support post-trial care planning for participants of implantable device trials. Responses are due on May 25, 2026.

In a brief question-and-answer session following his presentation, Dr. Ngai emphasized the role of high-density, high-resolution invasive neuromodulation data in facilitating the development of noninvasive devices; the importance of the BRAIN Initiative Cell Atlas Network ’s developmental brain atlas [4] in understanding the developmental origins of brain disorders; and the potential for tools like deep brain stimulation to not just treat symptoms of brain disorders, but modify disease states.

The MCWG meeting continued with a presentation from Anne Churchland, PhD, Professor of Neurobiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Dr. Churchland shared the accomplishments of the International Brain Laboratory (IBL), a large-scale research collaboration established in 2018 to develop a brain-wide map of electrophysiological activity associated with decision-making in mice. The IBL includes 22 laboratories and has published over 70 papers, including several in Nature and other high-impact journals. By sharing one protocol and one open dataset, the IBL overcame challenges common to large-scale team science efforts, such as data fragmentation, reproducibility, and coordination.

To record a brain-wide map of decision-making, the IBL developed a reproducible behavioral task for mice using standardized hardware and a standardized training paradigm. Mice used a Lego wheel to move an object on a screen and were rewarded when they moved the object towards the center of the screen. The object could begin on either the left or the right side of the screen, meaning mice had to choose whether to turn the wheel left or right to receive the reward. The object’s contrast relative to the screen’s background varied across trials to modify the difficulty of the task. Neural activity was recorded during this task using Neuropixels probes. Twelve laboratories contributed to recording neural activity across 700 probe insertion sites, and each mouse included a probe in a standardized site to ensure reproducibility. The IBL found that choice signals are active across several areas of the mouse brain during decision-making, suggesting a brain-wide strategy for mediating complex tasks. Furthermore, mice combine prior knowledge with sensory information to determine which direction to move the object on the screen, particularly when the object’s contrast is low.

The IBL has continued its work through a BRAIN Initiative U19 grant involving 10 research groups. They developed a mouse model for behavioral inflexibility using Neurexin1α, a general risk allele for Autism Spectrum Disorder and other neurodevelopmental disorders, and measuring cortex-wide neural activity in knockout and wild type mice through widefield calcium imaging. The Neurexin1α knockout mice take longer to adjust to new study conditions and exhibit increased neural activity correlations across multiple cortical regions compared to the wild type mice, suggesting that the knockout mice are less able to update behavioral priors and change behaviors accordingly. The IBL is also examining the neurobiology of long-term learning in wild type mice using a device called the independent dovetail implants for electrophysiology, or “indie,” which can stably record brain activity in mice for over a year. The IBL has found that as the mice learn, they become more accurate decision-makers, and the stimulus and movements become more strongly encoded in all areas of the brain. The IBL recently assembled a core board of principal investigators and has been building a network of new collaborators to build upon their work.

The meeting ended with a discussion about Dr. Churchland’s work with the IBL. Topics included next steps in the IBL’s research pipeline, opportunities for further collaboration, the utility of the IBL’s pooled dataset for brain foundation models, and strategies to successfully implement large-scale research collaborations.

For more on the open session of the MCWG meeting, view the video recording . The next MCWG meeting will be held on August 19, 2026.

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[1] Ngai J. Inventing the future: A neuroscience research roadmap. Neuron. 2026 May 6;114(9):1540-4.

[2] Wadia VS, Reed CM, Chung JM, Bateman LM, Mamelak AN, Rutishauser U, Tsao DY. A shared code for perceiving and imagining objects in human ventral temporal cortex. Science. 2026 Apr 9;392(6794):207-15.

[3] Casto C, Poliak M, Tuckute G, Small H, Sherlock P, Wolna A, Lipkin B, D’Mello AM, Fedorenko E. The cerebellar components of the human language network. Neuron. 2026 Apr 15;114(8):1504-23.

[4] BICAN: A cell census of the developing human brain

Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® Initiative