Neuroscience and electroengineering
NERF: WHERE CUTTINGEDGE NANOTECHNOLOGY AND NEUROPHYSIOLOGY UNITE Hot on the heels of VIB's molecular neuroscience research, VIB managing director Jo Bury and imec director Gilbert Declerck invited the brightest minds in Flanders from both VIB and imec to come up with the next big idea in exploring the functioning of the brain. “We put them together in a board room for two brainstorming sessions and - by manner of speaking - didn’t let them out until they came up with something really crazy,” Bury recalls with a broad smile. “You wouldn’t believe how quickly they emerged.” On that day in 2008 the earliest beginnings of Neuro Electronics Research Flanders, or NERF, were firmly taking root. It’s not that NERF started in a garage – but the big dream vibe was definitely there. “The whole concept began when Gilbert Declerck, at the time director of the micro- and nanotechnology research institute imec, and I got together and started talking 12 years ago,” says Jo Bury, managing director of VIB. “We were both leading strategic research centers in Flanders, but in completely different areas – VIB in life sciences, imec in micro-electronics. We both shared this starry-eyed ambition of fusing the state of the art in biology with the cutting edge in micro and nanotech.”
On the origin of impact
Intriguing concept, but a bit too broad. Their discussion got more and more detailed as they reflected on which fields in biological sciences would be transformed most dramatically by electronics. “Of course, that’s when we arrived at the brain and the nervous system, a complex network of pathways for electrical signals in the body,” Bury continues. “Neuroscientists at VIB were already growing brain cells in the laboratory, and we wondered, ‘can we grow actual neuronal circuits in vitro and measure their electrical activity in real time?’ It really fired us up.”
