La Jolla Institutions to Create Brain Research Center

UC San Diego, the Research Institute of Scripps Clinic and the Salk Institute have been awarded a $1.2-million, three-year grant to create and operate a center that will study perception, language and memory.

The institutions will use grant money from the James S. McDonnell Foundation of St. Louis and the Pew Charitable Trusts of Philadelphia to fund the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, where “students at each institution can . . . participate with the senior staff in interdisciplinary research,” said a spokeswoman for the charitable trusts.

Researchers at the institutions, all in La Jolla, are studying aspects of neuroscience, but the center will focus specifically on brain functions that govern learning and attention.

The award is part of a $12-million program to advance mind-brain research. Similar grants were awarded to the University of Arizona, Dartmouth College, Johns Hopkins University, Montreal Neurological Institute, the University of Oregon, Oxford University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The grant marked yet another example of collaborative effort among researchers at the three La Jolla-based institutions. Earlier this year, UCSD and Scripps Clinic hired organic chemist Kyriacos C. Nicolaou to serve as a UCSD professor and head of Scripps’ new chemistry department.

At the time, UCSD Chancellor Richard Atkinson said the joint appointment marked a “new era of cooperation” between the university and Scripps.

Terrence J. Sejnowski, director of the Salk Institute’s Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, will direct the center’s operations. Sejnowski is also as a professor of biology and physics at UCSD.

The grant will support eight graduate students and four post-doctoral fellows.