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About NORBRAIN

NORBRAIN provides nationwide access to cutting-edge neurotechnology, and offers services to researchers from universities in Norway and other national users. The access to new technologies will attract not only investigators in basic research disciplines at the universities but also biopharma and diagnostics companies with a potential for translating basic research to treatment and industrial application.

Mission

NORBRAIN enables research to determine neural mechanisms of behavior and crack the neural codes of the brain.

Key goals

To provide state-of-the-art research tools with a capacity for enabling novel insight into how complex mental functions and dysfunctions emerge from distributed neuronal activity in local brain circuits.
To apply knowledge from basic science for the development of new diagnostic tools and treatments for neurological and neuropsychiatric disorders.

Facilities

NORBRAIN is hosted by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), with University of Oslo (UiO) and University of Bergen (UiB) as partners.
NORBRAIN facilities are shared between UiO, UiB and NTNU.

History

In 2011 an infrastructure for level-spanning neuroscience technology – NORBRAIN – was established at NTNU and the University of Oslo through the Research Council of Norway’s Infrastructure Program. But as neurotechnology develops at a rate comparable to computer- and cell phone technology, one has seen the need to update and expand facilities to stay on top and keeping Norway at the leading edge of neuroscience. Therefore, with additional funding in 2015 and 2019, NORBRAIN have been able to expand. University of Bergen (UiB) joined as a partner in 2019 and has a unique profile on cellular-synaptic physiology.
In 2024, NORBRAIN was renewed for a fourth round of funding – NORBRAIN4. The grant of 80 million kroners will go towards further development and renewal of technical equipment at NTNU, UiO and UiB. It will also contribute to the establishment of a Norwegian unit of the European digital research infrastructure EBRAINS.

A story of success

Establishing a large-scale infrastructure for 21st century neuroscience – NORBRAIN1 – clearly changed the scene. The project has been immensely successful, attracting more than 400 internal and external users on 100 research projects and resulting in almost a dozen Nature, Science and Cell papers in basic neuroscience since its inception in 2012.
In 2014, Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser were awarded the Nobel Prize for their work on spatial computation in entorhinal cortex. Several promising young research groups have branched off from the Mosers, many of whom perform circuit analyses of different brain functions in different brain systems in new laboratories at NTNU and elsewhere.

About NORBRAIN

Mission

Key goals

Facilities

History

A story of success

ntnu.edu/kavli

med.uio.no/imb

uib.no/biomedisin