The large size of the UCLA neuroscience community and the diversity of approaches mean that it is impossible for individual departments to take responsibility for stewardship of the discipline of neuroscience at UCLA. The BRI, as the central administrative and intellectual unit, is needed to provide a functional and symbolic center for neuroscience activities on campus. The role is functional in the sense that the BRI fosters interdepartmental cooperation in research and education, and provides services to the neuroscience community as a whole. The role is symbolic because without a central unit the discipline would be seen as fragmented. The symbolism of a unitary neuroscience organization is important in attracting faculty, students and funding to UCLA.

Non-departmental units such as ORUs can represent agents for faster change, creating or disbanding interdepartmental research and educational affinity groups as the need arises. The large size of a discipline like neuroscience creates the need for a unifying influence. The BRI is a coherent and cohesive force that takes advantage of opportunities for cooperation among and between departments.

It is very apparent that the BRI plays a critical role on campus. It is the only organized unit that effectively unites the highly diverse UCLA neuroscience community by initiating and fostering interdepartmental cooperation in research and education. The BRI has reached new levels of success. In many ways, the recent "Sunset Review" was a sunrise review. The BRI is essential to the continued and increasing excellence of UCLA neuroscience, now and in the future.

The BRI’s mission is

· to increase understanding of how the brain works, how it develops, and how it responds to experience, injury and disease, and
· to help make UCLA the preeminent center for translating basic knowledge into medical interventions and new technologies.

To execute this mission, the BRI functions explicitly as the interdisciplinary and non-departmental voice of the basic neuroscience community. The BRI’s strategic goals for the next five years are:

· to invigorate research programs and to nurture novel collaborations that bring together investigators from complementary fields;
· to stimulate the translation of basic knowledge into therapies and cures for diseases and injuries of the nervous system;
· to recruit outstanding faculty, postdoctoral fellows and graduate students;
· to strengthen existing educational programs by fostering the integration of insights from basic neuroscience, cell and molecular biology, cognitive science, engineering and clinical neuroscience; and
· to extend scientific knowledge into the commercial sector and into elementary and secondary schools.

The BRI’s goal is for UCLA to become the preeminent center of excellence for neuroscience research and education and for the “translation” of research into clinical and technological applications. In the next five years, its efforts will focus on four areas of neuroscience: (1) learning, memory, and plasticity; (2) neural repair; (3) neuroengineering; and (4) neurogenetics. UCLA’s strength in these areas comes from multidisciplinary efforts to understand the nervous system at multiple levels with diverse technologies. These efforts depend on the close cooperation of all neuroscience units on campus.