Our History
Neuropixels originated at the HHMI Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, from discussions between Tim Harris, a tool maker, and neuroscientists Albert Lee (I want to insert 100 probes with 1000 channels each) and Dima Rinberg, now at NYU, who said: “32 channels just isn’t enough”. Two projects were launched. First, a family of conventional silicon probes with up to 64 channels/shank was developed, licensed to and now sold by Cambridge Neurotech. For recording from these probes, the first multiplexing head stage recording system (named "Whisper") was designed and built by Brian Barbarits, then at Janelia, Second, Tim Harris, with copious input from the Janelia community, wrote a specification and went searching the technology community for the capability to design and fabricate a programmable high channel count fully integrated probe. Imec in Leuven, Belgium, offered to make and manufacture these devices. The first project yielded a probe now called Neuropixels 1.0.
Neuropixels was developed with funding from a consortium of private charities, HHMI Janelia Research Campus, Allen Institute for Brain Science, The Gatsby Charitable Foundation, and the Wellcome Trust. Together they supplied ~$5.5 million dollars for design and fabrication, plus millions more in support for probe testing and software development.
Our Team
Timothy Harris
Research Professor
Tim Harris is a research professor, sharing his time between the Johns Hopkins Department of Biomedical Engineering and the JHMI Janelia Research Campus. He is the originator of the project that produced the Neuropixels Si probe for extra cellular recording in animals, mostly mice and rats but including more than 20 species. At Johns Hopkins, Tim has pursued this thread to produce a more advanced technology, Neuropixels NXT. The small 1536 channel probes now allow recording 10-20,000 neurons in rodents and 30-50,000 neurons in non-human primates. They are now moving from producing the probes to exploiting this technology for brain wide recording, including brain changes generated by psychedelics, learning, and disease.
Austin Graves
Assistant Research Professor, Biomedical Engineering
Austin Graves’ lab seeks to understand how the brain represents learning and memory as functional changes within complex networks of synapses and neurons. They employ a wide variety of approaches from systems neuroscience, neuroengineering, molecular biology, and computational data science to image and record neural activity in behaving rodents. They seek to elucidate neurophysiological encoding of behavior, and observe how these processes are disrupted by pharmacological agents and neurological disease
Our Sponsors
