Rikky Muller receives McKnight Technology Award!
The McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience (MEFN) announced the three recipients of $600,000 in grant funding through the 2020 McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Awards, recognizing these projects for their ability to fundamentally change the way neuroscience research is conducted. Each of the projects will receive a total of $200,000 over the next two years, advancing the development of these groundbreaking technologies used to map, monitor, and model brain function.
Rikky Muller received the award to design and build a high-speed holographic projector that can project 3D light into the brain at neural speeds, many times faster than current projectors, and so manipulate thousands of optogenetically controlled neurons with high precision. Read more about the project here.
Since the McKnight Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Award was established in 1999, the MEFN has contributed more than $14.5 million to innovative technologies for neuroscience through this award mechanism. The MEFN is especially interested in work that takes new and novel approaches to advancing the ability to manipulate and analyze brain function. Technologies developed with McKnight support must ultimately be made available to other scientists.
“Again, it has been a thrill to see the ingenuity that our applicants are bringing to new neurotechnologies,” said Markus Meister, Ph.D., chair of the awards committee and the Anne P. and Benjamin F. Biaggini professor of biological sciences at Caltech. “This year, we faced a tough choice among many exciting developments, and our awards span a broad range, from computational methods for big data from the brain, to fancy optics for the control of light beams, to a clever molecular strategy for surveying protein expression in neurons.”
This year’s selection committee also included Adrienne Fairhall, Timothy Holy, Loren Looger, Mala Murthy, Alice Ting, and Hongkui Zeng, who chose this year’s Technological Innovations in Neuroscience Awards from a highly competitive pool of 89 applicants.