Synergies of joint funding acquisition and research cooperation

Together with the American National Science Foundation (NSF), the Federal Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF) has launched a new funding programme in the important field of neuroscience. Both Germany and the United States play a leading role in the area of computational neuroscience. "That's why it's important to improve the cooperation between our two countries. This can only happen by structuring the funding processes of research cooperation more firmly," said Federal Research Minister Prof. Annette Schavan. On the basis of the funding collaboration agreement, both countries have pledged to jointly support German-American research projects beginning in 2010.

Of course, there have always been cooperative projects between researchers in both countries, but these were usually the result of spontaneous collaboration and often had to be integrated into existing projects. This new agreement will simplify and intensify research cooperation, and hopefully raise it to a new level. American and German partners will now be able to obtain financing through a joint funding programme, especially designed for this purpose, and work together on joint projects. Germany’s leading position is also the result of intensive financial support provided by the BMBF. For example, the BMBF established the "German Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience", a series of supplementary and coordinated funding measures, for which the BMBF has allocated more than 100 million euro. One of the key questions in the neurosciences concerns how the brain functions.

Computational neuroscience is a young research field which is trying to find answers to this by simulating brain activity - along with experimental investigation - in computer-based models. For more information about the German Bernstein Network Computational Neuroscience, please visit www.nncn.de.