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Global challenges are complex and must be tackled in a holistic manner. Understanding and addressing them requires collaboration across disciplines, often uniting the humanities and social and natural sciences, to ask better questions and identify practical and revolutionary solutions. Universities can be excellent vehicles for transformational change as they educate the next generation of civically-motivated thinkers to create meaningful action and impact. Too often systemic, artificial barriers exist within these institutions that prevent meaningful transdisciplinary collaboration from succeeding. We recommend that universities identify grand challenges and foster a culture of cross-department collaboration with appropriate internal and external resources to enable broader impacts. Together, funders and institutional policymakers play a critical strategic role in fostering civic scientists and transdisciplinary researchers to solve multifaceted global problems.
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Grand challenges for global brain sciences
The next grand challenges for science and society are in the brain sciences. A collection of 60+ scientists from around the world, together with 15+ observers from national, private, and foundations, spent two days together discussing the top challenges that we could solve as a global community in the next decade. We settled on three challenges, spanning anatomy, physiology, and medicine. Addressing all three challenges requires novel computational infrastructure. The group proposed the advent of The International Brain Station (TIBS), to address these challenges, and launch brain sciences to the next level of understanding.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1637376
- PAR ID:
- 10025105
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- F1000Research
- Volume:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 2046-1402
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2873
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.10025.1
