UCSD announced the inauguration on March 10 of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind, a new virtual center that will use interdisciplinary methods to conduct research on the relationship between the brain’s cellular makeup and the mind’s behavior. The center will be funded by a $7.5 million endowment, announced on the same date, from the Oxnard-based Kavli Foundation and its founder and chairman, Fred Kavli.

According to Jeffrey Elman, KIBM co-director and UCSD associate dean of social sciences, the main goal of the new research institute is to increase interdisciplinary collaboration in order to understand the connection between the brain and mind. KIBM will consist of researchers from over 20 academic disciplines, including biology, anthropology, cognitive science, psychology and linguistics. Researchers from UCSD School of Medicine, the Salk Institute, The Scripps Research Institute and the neurosciences graduate program, which is ranked first in the nation by the National Research Council, will also be included.

“There’s probably the largest collection of people [at UCSD] who are interested in the mind and brain, and the quality of the researchers is very high,” Elman said. “We also have a record of disregarding interdisciplinary boundaries. The walls between disciplines are very low.”

According to Nicholas Spitzer, KIBM co-director and UCSD biology professor, the institute will accomplish two objectives. The first concerns cross-disciplinary education. Researchers will attend “boot camps” — intensive one or two week-long training programs of lectures, discussions and hands-on experience — in order to become familiar with the concepts and methodologies unique to each discipline.

The second objective is the support of innovative research, at both the faculty and graduate student levels, that can help bridge the gap between studies of the brain and those of the mind.

“When you take two existing bodies of knowledge, like two sticks, and you start rubbing them together, you get sparks and then fire,” Spitzer said.

KIBM will generate a list of research projects by contacting UCSD and La Jolla-based faculty and encouraging them to submit research proposals. According to Spitzer, the institute will be as inclusive as possible in its research invitations.

“From the preliminary discussions we’ve had … we know there are many ambitious and smart people who are interested in the brain and mind,” Spitzer said. “So we don’t anticipate any problems in getting interesting proposals.”

Although the focus of KIBM is on basic research, both Elman and Spitzer feel that new research breakthroughs will have great potential benefits to society, particularly in health-related areas.

“It’s very clear for researchers that advances in mental health [and] advances in brain disease will require understanding the brain as a first step,” Elman said.

The Kavli Foundation was established in December 2000 by Kavli, a Norwegian-born physicist and prominent California business leader. The Foundation is dedicated to advancing knowledge in the areas of cosmology, neuroscience and nanoscience, and has already established institutes at Stanford and UC Santa Barbara. The foundation also announced the creation of research institutes at six other universities in the U.S. and Europe — Yale, Columbia, California Institute of Technology, Cornell, University of Chicago and Delft University of Technology in Holland.

“My goal in establishing these institutes is to support research at the frontiers of science,” Kavli said in a statement. “I feel that it is especially important to pursue the most far-reaching opportunities and challenges and to seek answers to the most fundamental unanswered questions.”

At UCSD, several researchers are enthusiastic about the benefits KIBM will bring to the campus.

“The UCSD community is widely regarded as one of the very best places in the world to do neuroscience research,” said Bill Kristan, professor and chair of the neurobiology department and director of the neurosciences graduate program. “The Kavli Center will help to strengthen this reputation.”

The $7.5 million endowment also contributes to the $1 billion fundraising goal of “The Campaign for UCSD: Imagine What’s Next.” To date, UCSD has raised $575.5 million for the campaign, which is scheduled to end in June 2007.