About Brain Week RI - Brain Week Rhode Island

Brain Week Rhode Island was conceived and is organized by Cure Alliance for Mental Illness, a national advocacy organization promoting increased research on mental illnesses. Brain Week RI is part of international Brain Awareness Week, which takes place each March to increase public awareness of the progress and benefits of brain research.

There is a wealth of neuroscience in Rhode Island—everything from very basic research to understand how genes and circuits operate in the brain to cutting edge clinical research that is restoring lost function to people with neuromuscular disorders. By combining this science with our vast creative capital, Brain Week RI showcases the work that happens here, and promotes a growing biomedical economic sector that holds promise for Rhode Island’s future.

Brain Week RI began in 2016 and is growing for 2017, adding more partners and more events. We hope Brain Week RI will grow each year, with events of all kinds taking place throughout our state. If you are interested in organizing a Brain Week event next year, please contact us.

We are grateful to all the people who are helping make Brain Week Rhode Island possible, especially all those who are organizing Brain Week events, as well as our lead sponsors, the Brown Institute for Brain Science and the George & Anne Ryan Neuroscience Institute at the University of Rhode Island.

See a summary of Brain Week 2016 here.

Brain Week RI organizers:

Hakon Heimer is co-founder and CEO of Cure Alliance, as well as founding editor of Schizophrenia Research Forum and a program advisor for cognitive disorders at the Banbury Center at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. His brother has schizophrenia.

Alden Bumstead is a nonprofit consultant and board member of Cure Alliance. She has family members and friends living with mental illness and a fascination for the ways that the human brain functions in our lived environment to make us each who we are.

Victoria Heimer-McGinn is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Brown University. She holds a PhD in Neuroscience and her research focuses on the brain's ability to understand spatial context, which is crucial to higher-order functions like decision-making, memory, perception, navigation and attention. She is interested in how these functions are disrupted in neuropsychiatric diseases like schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Dr. Heimer-McGinn is also the Outreach Director for Cure Alliance. She is committed to making neuroscience research accessible to non-scientists.

John Davenport is the associate director of the Brown Institute for Brain Science. He brings together his research background and experience in communication to serve as a liaison among the more than 100 faculty members at Brown who pursue research on the brain. He catalyzes communication and scientific collaboration among diverse disciplines, particularly the intersection of the physical and life sciences, and bridging basic science with clinical research and application.