Center for Integrative Neuroscience and Neuroengineering Research

The mission of the Center for Integrative Neuroscience and Neuroengineering Research (CINNR) is to foster research in systems and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago and neural engineering at Illinois Tech.

Work in the Center proceeds from basic science and clinical efforts and emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the nervous system. Research in the Center involves a wide range of projects, but five research goals are currently emphasized:

• To understand how information is coded by large populations of nerve cells or neurons. This involves collaborative efforts between neuroscientists, mathematicians, statisticians, and computer scientists.
• To use developing knowledge about neural codes to design and implement neural prosthetic devices (or brain machine interfaces) that can be implanted in the retina or visual centers of the central nervous system. Such devices can ameliorate the loss of vision, and can be implanted in the motor cortex and used to control movements in paralyzed patients.
• To increase our understanding of the basic causes of epilepsy, to develop new technologies that allow the prediction of epileptic seizures and the location of epileptic tissue in the brain, and to use brain machine interfaces to control seizures.
• To use neuroimaging technologies to understand how cognitive behaviors are coded in the human brain.
• To use methods from molecular biology to understand how events at the molecular level are related to normal behaviors and to disease states such as Alzheimer's disease, drug or alcohol abuse or psychiatric disorders.

The Center is managed by the Pritzker Institute of Biomedical Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology and the Committee on Computational Neuroscience at the University of Chicago. The Center is currently under reorganization. It is located at Technology Business Center, 3440 S. Dearborn St., Suite 142 in Chicago.

CINNR is a member of the Pritzker Institute of Biomedical Science & Engineering