The University of California was awarded a total of $7.2 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health to conduct brain-related research as part of the national BRAIN Initiative. The grants will be dispersed over three years.

In a separate BRAIN Initiative-related project, UC Berkeley has committed $12 million for a public/private collaboration between the school’s Brain Microscopy Innovation Center (BrainMIC) and Zeiss Optical Systems in Jena, Germany.

The collaboration will allow the two organizations to fast-track microscopy and imaging development for emerging neurotechnologies. It will also fund annual training to teach researchers how to use the technologies.

Part of the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, the BrainMIC program is expected to generate innovative devices and analytic tools for engineering, computation, chemistry and molecular biology, with the goal of enabling transformative brain science derived from studies of human cognition and neural circuits.

For more information, visit www.nih.gov.