Research Centres and Facilities
Azrieli Centre for Autism Research
Centre for Neurological Disease Models
Neurosurgical Simulation Research Centre
Research Groups
Neuro faculty members lead international research teams that generate fundamental information that spans the full spectrum of neuroscience from cell and molecular biology to brain imaging and cognitive neuroscience.
Interdisciplinary Teams
The Neuro’s multidisciplinary teams, including an additional 220 academic staff, generate fundamental information that spans the full spectrum of neuroscience from cell and molecular biology to brain imaging and cognitive neuroscience.
The programs listed below, offered in partnership with The Neuro, provide scientists and researchers with opportunities to engage in novel cross-disciplinary research, integrating neuroscience with principles of engineering and the physical sciences.
The Neuro Engineering Program and the Rio Tinto Laboratory of Neuro Engineering
The Neuro Engineering Program is a merger of physical and biological sciences. Together, physicists, chemists, materials scientists, computer engineers and neuroscientists tackle the challenges of creating interfaces between neurons and artificial substrates to restore the function of a damaged nervous system.
Visit their website
Canadian Neurophotonics Platform
The Neurophotonics Centre is a unique, state-of-the-art national facility for advanced Biophotonics approaches dedicated toward the understanding of the brain, the development of diagnostics for brain disorders and phototherapy. The centre brings together a team of researchers, scientists and staff who develop and use the most innovative methods integrating neuroscience and physics.
Visit their website
Partnerships and Awards
Awards and grants
The Neuro Cambridge University Graduate Studentship Awards
Competitive Graduate Studentship Awards support students working in one of two areas:
- Nervous System Development, Homeostasis, Degeneration and Repair, and
- Autism and Related Neurodevelopmental Conditions.
Awards will be made on a strictly competitive basis. The deadline for receipt of application is August 15th. Successful applicants will be notified during the month of September.
The partners gratefully acknowledge the support of The Douglas Avrith Neuro-Cambridge Neuroscience Collaboration Initiative.
For more information acar.mni [at] mcgill.ca (subject: International%20Partnerships) (contact us)
Partnerships
Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives
Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives (HBHL) is an interdisciplinary program, built on McGill's global leadership in interdisciplinary neuroscience, that uses big data analysis to reveal the fundamental mechanisms underlying normal brain function and brain disorders. Several Neuro researchers hold HBHL leadership positions.
Neuroscience Center Zurich (ZNZ)
McGill University and The Neuro, with funding from the Azrieli Centre for Autism Research (ACAR), have launched two pilot project grant competitions; one with the University of Edinburgh and the other with the University of Zurich/Swiss Federal Institute of Technology represented by the Neuroscience Center Zurich (ZNZ). They are providing competitive Joint Pilot Project Grants to support collaborative work in the area of neurodevelopment and neurodevelopmental disorders.
University of Edinburgh
In 2019 McGill University and The University of Edinburgh announced a neuroscience research partnership between the two institutions. The targeted areas for collaborative research focus on autism/neurodevelopmental disorders, intellectual disabilities (with particular focus on studies using human induced pluripotent stem cells), and neurodegenerative diseases.
https://www.mcgill.ca/neuro/article/research/mcgilledinburgh-partnership-moves-forward
Trinational Axis in Normal and Pathological Cognitive Aging
The Trinational Axis in Normal and Pathological Cognitive Aging project investigates the basic mechanisms of dementia, identify early biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease, foster the clinical translation of research findings, and assess the impact of different aspects of lifestyle (sleep, physical exercise, nutrition) on aging and dementia. It is a partnership between Canadian, Cuban and Chinese researchers.
http://ludmercentre.ca/canada-cuba-china-partnership-gets-1m-study-alzheimers/
Capture ALS
CAPTURE ALS (Comprehensive Analysis Platform To Understand, Remedy, and Eliminate ALS) is a Canadian initiative that is developing the world’s most detailed and comprehensive picture of the disease.
https://www.mcgill.ca/neuro/article/open-science-research/ultimate-snapshot-als
Transforming Autism Care Consortium
The Transforming Autism Care Consortium (TACC) is a research network that connects and mobilizes Quebec's strengths in autism research to improve the quality of life of people with autism and their families. They accomplish this by accelerating scientific discovery, building capacity, and integrating evidence into practice and policy.
Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform
Neuro researchers are part of the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP), which provides an infrastructure for the promotion of open-science workflows and the sharing of neuroscience data. This platform brings together many of the country’s leading scientists in basic and clinical neuroscience to form an interactive network of collaborations in brain research, interdisciplinary student training, international partnership, clinical translation, and open publishing. The CONP aims to propel Canada’s basic and clinical neuroscience communities into a new era of commonly shared, digitally integrated, data- and algorithmic-rich neuroscience research.
EEGNet
EEGNet is an open repository for EEG data that helps scientists investigate neurodevelopmental, psychiatric, and neurodegenerative disorders. By working with scientists and laboratories from across Canada and around the world, EEGNet aims to standardize data formats and analysis tools to establish an optimal network for collaboration and data-sharing.
Ludmer Centre
The Ludmer Centre for Neuroinformatics & Mental Health is an innovative collaboration between the Douglas Research Centre, the Jewish General Hospital’s Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research, and The Neuro. Leveraging over 20 years of research, neuroinformatics expertise and infrastructure, and international collaborations, the Ludmer Centre is uniquely poised to become a world leader in big-data analysis for brain and mental-health research.
Sandra and Alain Bouchard Intellectual Disability Research Program
With support of a $4-million gift from the Sandra and Alain Bouchard Foundation, researchers at The Neuro collaborate with colleagues at the CHU Sainte-Justine to collect brain imaging, clinical, demographic, genetic (DNA) and cellular data and samples from patients with intellectual disabilities. These materials will provide an unprecedented resource for understanding the complex mechanisms at work in the brain circuitry of patients, and for developing “toolkits” that will allow scientists to test promising new therapies.
https://www.mcgill.ca/newsroom/channels/news/4-million-research-intellectual-disabilities-261428
The Neuro-CareAxis Partnership
The Neuro-CareAxis Partnership aims to reduce surgical wait time and relive spinal pain for patients across Quebec. Instead of going through diagnostic tests and making appointments with surgeons, patients are directed to physiotherapists, who can identify whether the patients require surgery.
https://www.mcgill.ca/neuro/patients-visitors/clinics-and-programmes/neuro-careaxis-partnership
Neuro Genomics Partnership
The Neuro Genomics Partnership (NGP) aims to create a powerful precompetitive genetic, clinical and drug discovery platform. The NGP supports infrastructure for whole genome sequencing, deep clinical phenotyping, brain imaging, and remote monitoring with wearable apps, as well as the development of stem cell lines from patients with neurological diseases who have volunteered to participate in Open Science research.
The Neuro-CERVO Alliance for Drug Discovery (NCADD)
NCADD is a partnership between The Neuro and the CERVO Brain Research Centre of the CIUSSS de la Capitale-Nationale, affilitated with l’Université Laval. It works to find biomarkers to stratify patients and facilitate development of personalized therapies for neurological diseases. The project primarily focuses on patients affected by Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder as well as healthy individuals recruited as controls.
https://www.mcgill.ca/neuro/channels/news/new-quebec-neuroscience-partnership-awarded-7m-335490
The Neuro/Paris Brain Institute Workshop
The Joint Paris Brain Institute (ICM)/The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) Workshop is a series of meetings to promote and sustain neuroscience research collaborations in fields of mutual strategic interest.
The Big Brain Project
BigBrain is a human post-mortem brain that has been sectioned, stained for cell bodies, scanned at very high resolution, and then digitally reconstructed in 3D. It is the product of a collaborations between Neuro researchers and those at Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany. They are extending this model by further increasing its resolution and integrating multimodal data, working closely with the neuroimaging, brain modelling, and AI communities to unleash its potential for research. To enable collaboration, they are building a transcontinental data sharing and computing platform in close interaction with the European Human Brain Project and the Canadian Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives program.
Canadian Open Parkinson’s Network (C-OPN)
The mission of C-OPN is to unite and mainstream research efforts to more efficiently find ways to treat Parkinson’s disease. Its objective is to support a large-scale, national research network to discover and deliver new personalized treatments and services that improve lives.
Quebec Parkinson’s Network
The Quebec Parkinson Network (QPN) is a clinical research network financed by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Santé (FRQS). The QPN consists of an association of researchers and clinicians from all over Quebec working together on Parkinson's disease. Its primary mission to gather data for the creation of three distinct databases: a participant registry, a clinical, neuroimaging, neuropsychological and sleep database, and a biological material bank.
YCharos
YCharOS Inc. (Antibody Characterization through Open Science) is a Canadian, fee-for-service, open science company with the mission of characterizing commercial antibodies for all human gene products. YCharOS’s scientific methods and results are transparent and patent-free. YCharOS collaborates with and financially supports the laboratory of Peter McPherson at The Neuro. YCharOS collaborates with and is supported by Structural Genomics Consortium led by Aled Edwards at University of Toronto.
DEMySTIFI
Data Extraction in Multiple Sclerosis To Inform Future Interventions (DEMySTIFI) is a database of multiple sclerosis patient data that uses The Neuro’s Clinical Biospecimen Imaging and Genetic Repository to better analyze and understand the nuances of MS. The goal is to eventually personalize treatment selection for individual patients. DEMySTIFI will include data gathered from the latest MS clinical trials.
https://www.mcgill.ca/neuro/article/research/new-frontiers-ms-research
BrainStorm
Brainstorm is a collaborative, open-source application dedicated to the analysis of brain recordings: MEG, EEG, fNIRS, ECoG, depth electrodes and multiunit electrophysiology. Its objective is to share a comprehensive set of user-friendly tools with the scientific community using MEG/EEG as an experimental technique. The software is a close collaboration between the BIG lab at USC (led by Richard Leahy) and the MEG research groups at The Neuro (led by Sylvain Baillet) and at the Cleveland Clinic (led by John Mosher).
