![\"Photo](\"\/\/media.nature.com\/w800\/magazine-assets\/d41586-019-03065-7\/d41586-019-03065-7_17269950.jpg\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>Staff members at the Allen Institute in Seattle, Washington, a non-profit research organization that includes the Allen Institute for Brain Science.<\/span>Credit: Allen Institute<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Christof Koch was finishing his PhD on theoretical brain modelling in 1982 when he received a worrying telegram from his adviser, Tomaso Poggio.<\/p>\n Poggio, who had relocated to the United States from what was then West Germany the previous year, warned Koch, who was planning to join him, that he might struggle to find a US position. After getting his PhD from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in T\u00fcbingen, Koch had hoped to take up a postdoc role in Poggio\u2019s new laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.<\/p>\n But Poggio had discovered that there was already someone in the United States making computational brain models and, Koch says, he wrote, \u201cI\u2019m worried, are there enough faculty positions to cover two people modelling the brain in the entire United States of America?\u201d<\/p>\n That seems funny now, says Koch, because today there\u2019s no shortage of such positions; he estimates that 5,000 people in the United States do something similar. \u201cNow every university will have two, three, four, five faculty that do nothing but theoretical neuroscience, computational neuroscience, data science in the brain,\u201d he says. And there are now many other jobs in neuroscience, at places ranging from conventional research universities and dedicated institutes to companies developing neurotechnology. \u201cThere\u2019s a variety of opportunities, vastly more than ever before,\u201d Koch says. \u201cIt\u2019s a fantastic time to study the brain.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n On the map<\/strong><\/p>\n Many of those opportunities come from the rise of large-scale national and international projects dedicated to understanding the human brain. In the past six years, the European Union, the United States and Japan have all launched multi-year, multimillion-dollar projects to suss out the workings of the brain \u2014 how it learns, how it controls behaviour and how it goes wrong. Koch himself participates in some of those projects in his role as chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, a non-profit research organization in Seattle, Washington, endowed by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. The institute is building a catalogue of the various cell types in both human and mouse brains, called the Allen Brain Atlas.<\/p>\n Other countries \u2014 Canada, Australia, South Korea and China \u2014 are in the early stages of their own large-scale efforts. Along with the goal of describing in detail just how the brain works at various levels, from the cellular to the behavioural, the hope is that these projects will lead to new ways to treat brain diseases and mental-health conditions, as well as advance artificial-intelligence (AI) technologies. To do that, investors are providing the projects with billions of dollars in new funding, creating career opportunities for not only neuroscientists but also physicists, mathematicians, chemists, materials scientists and medical specialists, all of whom must be trained to work across disciplines.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Visualization of the whole brain, simulated using real data from TheVirtualBrain framework. Colours represent different groups of connected neurons.<\/span>Credit: TheVirtualBrain<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The European Union\u2019s effort, a 10-year, roughly \u20ac1-billion (US$1.1-billion) programme called the Human Brain Project (HBP), was launched in 2013. The sprawling endeavour directly employs 500 scientists spread across universities, hospitals and research centres throughout Europe, and provides funding that supports many more. Its aim, explains scientific research director Katrin Amunts, who studies the brain at Heinrich Heine University D\u00fcsseldorf in Germany, is to develop tools for studying the brain and create an infrastructure of supercomputers and data-sharing platforms that will allow researchers to do more comprehensive studies than they could on their own. \u201cIn ten years we will not have understood the human brain. It is simply too complex and we still have to learn a lot,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n That does not mean, however, that the world will have to wait for some vague future date to see any benefits. For instance, Viktor Jirsa, a physicist who directs the Institute of Neuroscience Systems at Aix-Marseille University in France, has used information about how individual neurons are linked together in the brain \u2014 the \u2018connectome\u2019 \u2014 to develop the Virtual Epilepsy Patient. He takes readings of the brains of people experiencing epileptic seizures and uses the measurements to pinpoint more precisely the sources of those seizures. The hope is that, by targeting specific neural connections involved in a particular person\u2019s epilepsy, brain surgeons can perform more targeted treatments and improve the success rate of surgery to stop epileptic seizures beyond the current success rate of roughly 50%. Jirsa is in the middle of a randomized clinical trial to test the idea on about 350 people.<\/p>\n Another practical benefit Amunts hopes the HBP will yield is a visual prosthesis that could restore sight to people who are blind. This is being developed by neuroscientist Pieter Roelfsema, who leads the Vision and Cognition Group at the Netherlands Institute for Neurosciences in Amsterdam. Building a bridge between the biological understanding of the visual cortex and the engineering result of a robotic eye is the sort of outcome the HBP aims to achieve, she says. Along the way, researchers are developing better AI algorithms to decipher brain functions, and virtual robots in which to test whether the mechanisms they think they\u2019ve uncovered would work in people.<\/p>\n Amunts doesn\u2019t expect the HBP to uncover all of the brain\u2019s secrets, and welcomes other national programmes. \u201cAny project in the world cannot address all questions related to the human brain,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Building circuits<\/strong><\/p>\n With megaprojects such as the HBP, as well as other, smaller national programmes (see \u2018Projects around the globe\u2019) and their associated funding, neuroscience is a growth area. \u201cIt\u2019s a really great time for young people to enter the field,\u201d says Walter Koroshetz, a neurologist who directs the US National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Although there\u2019s plenty of opportunity for researchers in biology and medicine, there\u2019s also a great need for people from other disciplines \u2014 particularly from fields that will help to develop tools to push the research forward. \u201cThe people who are going to build those are not the biologists, they\u2019re the engineers and the materials scientists and the physicists,\u201d says Koroshetz. \u201cAnd the people who are going to look at neural activity and try to figure out what it means, what\u2019s the language of the brain, are going to be mathematicians and computer scientists.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"Visualization](\"\/\/media.nature.com\/w800\/magazine-assets\/d41586-019-03065-7\/d41586-019-03065-7_17269954.png\")
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