Partnerships Accelerate Brain Research
Who knows if 1,000 typing monkeys would ever write a Shakespeare play, but the odds improve with 2,000...
Partnerships between leading institutions have become a key component in the rapidly developing field of neuroscience research. The field is so complex and diverse that experts take different approaches to tackling problems and sharing the findings has become a vital to speeding the research and maximizing research budgets
Partnerting is an important part of the approach being taken by the Brain@McGill. Over the years, the McGill medical community has forged dozens of long-standing and successful relationships with like-minded groups around the world. The Brain@McGill starts from a strong base.
Neuroscience derives particular benefit from partners in such areas as brain imaging and genetics through the ability to access large pools of diverse populations.
The first major new partnership put in place in 2009 is a natural one – with Oxford University in England. Important links between McGill and Oxford have been in place for many decades. In 1915, Dr. Wilder Penfield was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and it was while there that he came to see the brain and nervous system as “unexplored country”.
A second partnership arrangement was announced in May 2010, with Imperial College in London.
In October 2010, building on McGill's worldwide reputation as a leader in neuroscience research, the University joined with two leading Swiss research institutions – the University of Zurich (UZH) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETHZ) – to enhance neuroscience research in a host of areas, in fields that include pain therapy, Alzheimer’s disease, synapse modelling and repair, neuroimmunology and genetic mechanisms of brain diseases.
Read more about these important collaborations.