The organization

The Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience is the country’s leading fundamental neuroscience research institute, in the international and progressive city of Amsterdam. It provides a critical mass of scientists (spanning more than 27 nationalities) and neuroscience facilities, in a highly interactive, dynamic, multi-cultural environment, with English as the working language.

There are over two hundred researchers at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, working in seventeen research groups. We collaborate with a number of universities and hospitals and are partner in the Spinoza Centre, a partnership that connects some four hundred neuroscientists in the Amsterdam area. We carry out experiments in humans, but also in animals to gain new insights into the functioning of the living brain.

The purpose of all this research is two-fold:

1. We want to obtain a fundamental understanding of brain mechanisms. These fundamental insights usually have deep implications for our insights into diseases.
2. We want to find ways to combat neurological and mental disorders. Blindness, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, Parkinson and Alzheimer, but also schizophrenia, depression, spinal cord transection, autism developmental disorders and severe sleeping disorders, which are all diseases that demand intense and long-term research by highly qualified scientists.

The institute houses the Netherlands Brain Bank to permit the examination of post-mortem human tissue. The institute also houses the Sleep Lab in which the researchers work together with volunteers to learn more about sleeplessness and depression.

The workings of the brain are still a puzzle. It is our task to solve it.