Newswise — Today the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced their first round of BRAIN Initiative awards, and six teams from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are among the recipients.  The MIT winners include: -Edward Boyden, Mark Bathe and Yin Peng:  Ultra-Multiplexed Nanoscale In Situ Proteomics for Understanding Synapse Types -Ian Wickersham: Novel technologies for nontoxic transsynaptic tracing -Robert Desimone:  Vascular Interfaces for Brain Imaging and Stimulation -Alan Jasanoff:  Calcium sensors for molecular fMRI -Elly Nedivi and Peter So:  Next generation high-throughput random access imaging, in vivo -Mriganka Sur: Cortical circuits and information flow during memory-guided perceptual decisions About the BRAIN Initiative: Last year, President Obama launched the BRAIN Initiative as a large-scale effort to equip researchers with fundamental insights necessary for treating a wide variety of brain disorders like Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, and traumatic brain injury. Four federal agencies — NIH, the National Science Foundation, the Food and Drug Administration and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency — stepped up to the “grand challenge” and committed more than $110 million to the Initiative for fiscal year 2014. More information here: http://www.nih.gov/news/health/sep2014/od-30.htm