The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH, is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late 1880s and is now part of the United States Department of Health and Human Services. Many NIH facilities are located in Bethesda, Maryland, and other nearby suburbs of the Washington metropolitan area, with other primary facilities in the Research Triangle Park in North Carolina and smaller satellite facilities located around the United States. The NIH conducts its own scientific research through the NIH Intramural Research Program (IRP) and provides major biomedical research funding to non-NIH research facilities through its Extramural Research Program.
The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) is a part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). It conducts and funds research on brain and nervous system disorders and has a budget of just over US$2.03 billion. The mission of NINDS is "to reduce the burden of neurological disease—a burden borne by every age group, every segment of society, and people all over the world". NINDS has established two major branches for research: an extramural branch that funds studies outside the NIH, and an intramural branch that funds research inside the NIH. Most of NINDS' budget goes to fund extramural research. NINDS' basic science research focuses on studies of the fundamental biology of the brain and nervous system, genetics, neurodegeneration, learning and memory, motor control, brain repair, and synapses. NINDS also funds clinical research related to diseases and disorders of the brain and nervous system, e.g. AIDS, Alzheimer's disease, epilepsy, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease, spinal cord injury, stroke, and traumatic brain injury.
A neuromuscular disease is any disease affecting the peripheral nervous system (PNS), the neuromuscular junctions, or skeletal muscles, all of which are components of the motor unit. Damage to any of these structures can cause muscle atrophy and weakness. Issues with sensation can also occur.
Nodding disease, also known as nodding syndrome, is a mentally and physically disabling disease that affects children aged 3 and above, continuing into adulthood. It was first described in 1962 in secluded mountainous regions of Tanzania, with sporadic outbreaks in the decades since in South Sudan, Uganda, and again in Sudan with its largest outbreak from 2016 to present. Since 2019 cases have been identified in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic and Cameroon.
Robert Bernard Darnell is an American neurooncologist and neuroscientist, founding director and former CEO of the New York Genome Center, the Robert and Harriet Heilbrunn Professor of Cancer Biology at The Rockefeller University, and an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His research into rare autoimmune brain diseases led to the invention of the HITS-CLIP method to study RNA regulation, and he is developing ways to explore the regulatory portions—known as the "dark matter"—of the human genome.
Richard T. Johnson was a physician and scientist at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Johnson was a faculty member in the Department of Neurology since its inception in 1969 and was the former head of the department. His research into the effects of viruses on the central nervous system has been published in over 300 scientific articles, and Johnson was both a journal and book editor and the author of an influential textbook, Viral Infections of the Nervous System.
Gerald D. Fischbach is an American neuroscientist. He received his M.D. from the Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University in 1965 before beginning his research career at the National Institutes of Health in 1966, where his research focused on the mechanisms of neuromuscular junctions. After his tenure at the National Institutes of Health, Fischbach was a professor at Harvard University Medical School from 1972 to 1981 and from 1990 to 1998 and the Washington University School of Medicine from 1981 to 1990. In 1998, he was named the director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke before becoming the Vice President and Dean of the Health and Biomedical Sciences, the Dean of the Faculty of Medicine, and the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Columbia University from 2001 to 2006. Gerald Fischbach currently serves as the scientific director overseeing the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative. Throughout Fischbach's career, much of his research has focused on the formation and function of the neuromuscular junction, which stemmed from his innovative use of cell culture to study synaptic mechanisms.
Neurovirology is an interdisciplinary field which represents a melding of clinical neuroscience, virology, immunology, and molecular biology. The main focus of the field is to study viruses capable of infecting the nervous system. In addition to this, the field studies the use of viruses to trace neuroanatomical pathways, for gene therapy, and to eliminate detrimental populations of neural cells.
Eugene O. "Gene" Major is a senior investigator at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), a part of the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH). Major conducts research into the neurological diseases including progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML), caused by JC virus and often found in immunosuppressed patients such as those with HIV/AIDS. Major has published over 140 scientific articles and reviews in the peer-reviewed literature and has contributed to Fields Virology, a standard virology textbook.
Huda Yahya Zoghbi is a Lebanese-born American geneticist, and a professor at the Departments of Molecular and Human Genetics, Neuroscience and Neurology at the Baylor College of Medicine. She is the director of the Jan and Dan Duncan Neurological Research Institute. She was the editor of the Annual Review of Neuroscience from 2018-2024.
Joseph R. Berger is an American internist and neurologist who is known for his research interests in progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML), the neurological complications of HIV/AIDS, multiple sclerosis, and other inflammatory disorders of the brain. Particularly, he contributed research on why PML occurs more frequently in AIDS than in other immunosuppressive conditions.
The International Society for NeuroVirology (ISNV) was founded to promote research into disease-causing viruses that infect the human brain and nervous system. The ISNV membership includes scientists and clinicians from around the world who work in the fields of basic, translational, and clinical neurovirology.
Rajiv Ratan is an Indian American academic, professor, administrator and scientist based in New York. He is the Burke Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Weill Cornell Medicine. Since 2003, he has served as the executive director of Burke Neurological Institute and as a member of the Council of Affiliated Deans of Weill Cornell Medicine.
Igor Koralnik is an American physician, neurologist and scientist. He is one of the first physicians to study the neurologic complications caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and is a leading researcher in the investigation of the polyomavirus JC, which causes progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML), a disease of the central nervous system that occurs in immunosuppressed individuals.
Rebecca Gottesman is Senior Investigator and Stroke Branch Chief at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Before joining NINDS, she was Professor of Neurology and Epidemiology at Johns Hopkins University. Gottesman completed a B.A. in Psychology at Columbia University (1995), an M.D. at Columbia University (2000), and a Ph.D. in Clinical Investigation at Johns Hopkins University (2007). She is a Fellow of the American Neurological Association (2012) and a Fellow of the American Heart Association (2015).
Amanda Brown is an American immunologist and microbiologist as well as an associate professor of neurology and neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. Brown is notable for cloning one of the first recombinant HIV viruses and developing a novel method to visualize HIV infected cells using GFP fluorescence.
Howard E. Gendelman is an American physician-scientist whose research intersects the disciplines of neuroimmunology, pharmacology, and infectious diseases. Gendelman was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His research is focused on harnessing immune responses for therapeutic gain in HIV/AIDS and Neurodegenerative disease. He is the Margaret R. Larson Professor of infectious diseases and internal medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC) in Omaha.
Judith Richmond Walters is an American neuropharmacologist serving as chief of the neurophysiological pharmacology section at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.
Karen Faith Berman is an American psychiatrist and physician-scientist who is a senior investigator and chief of the section on integrative neuroimaging, the psychosis and cognitive studies section, and the clinical and translational neuroscience branch of the National Institute of Mental Health's division of intramural research.
Heather A. Cameron is an American neuroscientist who researches adult neurogenesis and diseases involving the hippocampus. She is the chief of the neuroplasticity section at the National Institute of Mental Health.
