HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, cracks open scientific fields by breaking through technical and intellectual barriers.

Our integrated teams of lab scientists and tool-builders pursue a small number of scientific questions with potential for transformative impact. To drive science forward, we share our methods, results, and tools with the scientific community.

Our first new research area leverages and transforms Janelia’s program on neural circuits and behavior, allowing us to pursue one of the biggest questions in brain science. Researchers in mechanistic cognitive neuroscience ask how does the brain enables cognition. This integrated program enables tool-builders, biologists, and theorists to collaborate to clear the technical, conceptual, and computational hurdles that have kept the most intriguing aspects of cognition beyond the purview of mechanistic investigation.