About the Institute

The Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech was founded in 2016 with the generous support of philanthropists Tianqiao Chen and Chrissy Luo. It is a key component of a neuroscience initiative that is geared toward deepening our understanding of the brain's structure and how the brain works at its most basic level, as well as why and how it fails as a result of disease or through the aging process.
Directed by David Anderson, the Seymour Benzer Professor of Biology and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience draws upon Caltech's strengths across a broad range of disciplines. It brings together faculty from throughout Caltech's academic divisions, catalyzing interactions within a diverse community of researchers from neuroscientists and biologists to economists, chemists, physicists, computer scientists, social scientists, and engineers. The work of these researchers will be focused through the Chen Institute at Caltech's six interdisciplinary research centers:
- the T&C Chen Brain-Machine Interface Center
- the T&C Chen Center for Social and Decision Neuroscience
- the T&C Chen Center for Systems Neuroscience
- the Center for Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience
- the Caltech Brain Imaging Center
- the Chen Center for Neuroscience Education
The Chen Institute at Caltech will ultimately be housed in a new state-of-the-art building that will be named in honor of the donors and function as the nexus for neuroscience research at Caltech.