On Oct. 1, 2015, The Kavli Foundation announced a $20 million award to establish the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute at The Johns Hopkins University.

The new Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute at The Johns Hopkins University, expected to launch in early 2016, will bring an interdisciplinary group of researchers together to investigate the workings of the brain.

The Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute, to be funded by a joint $20 million commitment by Kavli and Johns Hopkins, is designed to integrate neuroscience, engineering, and data science—three fields in which the university has long excelled—to understand the relationship between the brain and behavior.

Experimental tools in neuroscience are yielding larger and more complex data sets than ever before, but the ability of neuroscientists to manage and mine these data sets effectively has lagged behind, as has their ability to model the behavior of cells and circuits in the brain. The new institute aims to change that by drawing on the university’s expertise in “big data” analytics.

The 45 initial members of the Kavli Neuroscience Discovery Institute—including Director Richard L. Huganir, professor and director of the Department of Neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and co-director Michael I. Miller, professor of biomedical engineering—are drawn from 14 different departments in the Johns Hopkins schools of medicine, engineering, arts and sciences, and public health, and the Applied Physics Laboratory.