Ehud (Udi) Isacoff
Professor of Neurobiology, Molecular and Cell Biology
Director, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and Berkeley Brain Initiative (2013-present)
Director, Weill Neurohub East (2019-present)
Evan Rauch Chair in Neuroscience
Annual Message from Our Director
-December 2023-
I am thrilled to share that on December 1, 2023, we celebrated the grand opening of the NexGen 7T MRI brain scanner on our campus, which was developed by an international team led by Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute (HWNI) member David Feinberg in partnership with Siemens. The scanner is a tremendous technological advance that allows us to observe human brain activity at ultra-high resolution, putting UC Berkeley at the forefront of human brain imaging research. I would like to congratulate David and his team, including HWNI member Chunlei Liu, on their incredible achievement, and express our utmost gratitude to the NIH BRAIN Initiative, the UC Berkeley campus, and the Weill Neurohub for providing major funding for this project.
The scanner will be available to neuroscientists across the Weill Neurohub (a collaboration between UC Berkeley, UCSF and the University of Washington), as well as internationally through the NIH BRAIN Initiative. We anticipate that the NexGen 7T scanner will enable scientists to make important new discoveries about the organization and functioning of the human brain, and lead to new insights into brain diseases and disorders.
Earlier this fall, Weill Neurohub East was honored to host the annual Alliance for Therapies in Neuroscience (ATN) symposium on our campus for the first time. The ATN is a research partnership between the three universities in the Weill Neurohub and Roche and Genentech, aimed at accelerating the development of new therapies for debilitating brain diseases and disorders of the central nervous system — such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and multiple sclerosis — through collaborations between academic and industry scientists. Over 100 researchers from across the ATN’s institutions attended this year’s symposium, where they shared their research and discussed new ways they could potentially collaborate to advance understanding, diagnosis, and treatment of neurological diseases, and I am glad we could help facilitate these conversations and connections.
Speaking of new connections, I am delighted to welcome our newest HWNI faculty members Samantha Lewis, James Olzmann, Jacob Yates, and Gül Dölen (starting in January 2024) to our community, as well as theNeuroscience PhD Program entering class of 2023. We are so excited to have you join us!
David Feinberg cutting the ribbon at the grand opening of the NexGen 7T MRI. Photo credit: Brandon Alexis Sanchez Mejia