Center for Neural Circuit Mapping Translational Neuroscience Program

Our Vision: Cure Diseases of the Brain

Welcome to the UCI Center for Neural Circuit Mapping, where our pioneering team is taking the revolutionary step of mapping the human brain in unprecedented molecular detail. Understanding the brain’s neural circuitry is critical to advance therapies for devastating diseases of the brain – like Alzheimer’s, autism, depression and epilepsy – that rob the patient of their ability to engage with loved ones and the world around them.

Our team’s work will have the potential to identify early warning signs of these disorders when they are still treatable. In fact, in a recent key breakthrough, our team of experts discovered ways to reopen windows of neural development in adults, paving the way for previously unthinkable remedies. This is truly remarkable and is just the beginning of the innovations our team will be able to unlock.

The Center for Neural Circuit Mapping has emerged as a hub for new technologies and resources for biomedical research at UCI. With our team leading so many advances in this significant field of research, the time has come for our Center to establish a Translational Neuroscience Program. The program has been selected as one of 12 high-impact research programs that will be located in the Falling Leaves Foundation Medical Innovation Building.

In This New Facility

World-renowned scientists and clinicians, will collaborate in custom-designed labs to understand how individual cells and complex neural networks interact in space and time.

Interdisciplinary teams will work side-by-side to unlock extraordinary breakthroughs in treating disorders of the brain.

Future leaders will be trained to create a new foundational network to examine health and disease structure and function.

Indoor and outdoor gathering spaces for events, speakers and presentations will foster engagement and dialogue to speed and share discoveries.

Our Competitive Advantage

Empowered by the distinctive One Health approach of UCI Health Affairs that transcends disciplinary boundaries, the Center for Neural Circuit Mapping will comprise faculty and staff from the Susan & Henry Samueli College of Health Sciences which includes the schools of medicine, nursing, pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences, population and public health and UCI Health, our regional healthcare delivery system partnered with the Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute. With brilliant minds working together instead of in silos, our teams will push the boundaries of innovation and facilitate fundamental discoveries in science, medicine, health and wellness.

Our researchers include neuroscientists, engineers, virologists, computer scientists and mathematicians, all working together to advance our study of neural circuits.This level of detailed brain mapping will empower our team to define the mechanisms and pathways that underlie neurodevelopmental, neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders. All focused on one goal: to cure diseases of the brain.

With this initiative comes significant synergies with the Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute. One such example is that the Center for Neural Circuit Mapping will contribute to the Institute’s mission by establishing a powerful acupuncture research program. Our published, ongoing and proposed brain mapping studies are important for determining the neural and molecular mechanisms of acupuncture effects.

The brain map that we develop will point disease researchers in the right direction. Ultimately, this information might help us design gene therapies that target only the cell populations where treatment is needed – delivering the right genes to the right place at the right time.
Xiangmin Xu, PhD

A Visionary Leader

Xiangmin Xu, PhD
Director, Center for Neural Circuit Mapping
Chancellor’s Professor, Anatomy & Neurobiology
UCI School of Medicine

Xu leads an interdisciplinary team focused on neural circuit mechanisms that underlie cortical plasticity, learning, memory and cognition. His team is raising new hope for early treatments of brain disorders such as Alzheimer’s, depression and epilepsy. In September 2022, Xu’s Center for Neural Circuit Mapping launched a five-year project, in collaboration with two other institutions and backed by $126 million in federal funds, to map the human brain in unprecedented molecular detail.

Join Us in Making an Impact

We are seeking philanthropic partners to establish a home for the UCI Center for Neural Circuit Mapping Translational Neuroscience Program in the Falling Leaves Foundation Medical Innovation Building, and to support our programmatic funding to achieve transformational discoveries.

Named Spaces Within the Falling Leaves Foundation Medical Innovation Building

The overall design of the Falling Leaves Foundation Medical Innovation Building allows UCI to foster dynamic alliances that move discovery from inspiration to practice. There is the opportunity to name the new home for the Center for Neural Circuit Mapping Translational Neuroscience Program, as well as custom-designed laboratories and gathering spaces. As a philanthropic partner, you will ensure our scientists have the space, resources and facilities needed to perform their life-changing work.

Endowed Research Grants

Research endowments provide continuous support for our investigators who are reshaping the future of science and healthcare because external grants cover only a portion of costs. Moreover, endowed funding is particularly important to underwrite the most innovative discoveries and novel strategies because it provides the flexibility to follow the science that leads to breakthroughs. All this important work will be done under the name of our philanthropic partner. Named endowed scholarships underwrite the training of future generations of lead investigators and care providers in perpetuity.

Endowed Chairs

When you join us as a philanthropic partner naming an endowed chair, you will forever link your legacy to UCI’s distinguished experts. Ultimately, advances in biomedical research will lead to innovative therapies. Philanthropic funds for endowed chairs, research and scholarships live in perpetuity. These funds create the ability to recruit and retain top-tier faculty who will be critical for UCI to remain a world-class center of excellence for emerging therapies. Endowed chairs are so powerful because they establish a perpetual annual support stream for the chairholder to focus their efforts on aspirational research.

Partner With Us

Please join us as we make the Center for Neural Circuit Mapping Translational Neuroscience Program a reality. To learn more about exclusive naming opportunities for this transformative initiative, and for associated spaces within the medical innovation building, please contact:

Caroline Pereira, MBA
Associate Vice Chancellor of Health Advancement
caroline.pereira@uci.edu | 949-824-5577