The Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disorders will hold a workshop focused on identifying grand challenges in neuroscience, titled From Molecules to Mind: Challenges for the 21st Century.

The unifying theme for this workshop is the need to expand the understanding of how perception, cognition, and action arise in the human brain from interactions between molecules, chemicals, neurons, and circuits, the brain’s fundamental building blocks. This concept is pertinent to every level of brain organization, from understanding how molecules become assembled into neurons to how neurons get assembled into neuronal circuits, how those circuits develop unique properties and capabilities, and finally how dysfunction at any of these levels may lead to disorders of the brain. The workshop objectives are to:

• Illuminate the progress and successes made by the neuroscience community and highlight the challenges still facing the field.
• Identify the guiding principles, fundamental scientific questions, and goals that will inspire the scientific and public communities to support and engage this grand challenge.
• Identify the infrastructure and resource requirements that will be necessary to advance and accelerate discovery, including:
  • What will be the technology needs?
  • Which disciplines will need to be engaged and what will be their training requirements?