The Dutch National 14 Tesla Initiative in MRI and Cognition (DYNAMIC), bridge-fund

13-years ago, NWO invested in high field MRI, starting with Utrecht (7T), Leiden (7T) and Nijmegen (7T in Essen) and several years later including external funds expanded with facilities in Maastricht (9.4T+7T) and Amsterdam (7T) to strengthen the Dutch MRI and cognition field.

The consortium (grown to >1350 researchers in NL) has invested in a roadmap that managed to continuously break new barriers in revealing human biology, both in medical science and neuroscience.

Over the years, we learned that higher spatiotemporal resolution of functional imaging is crucial in understanding cognition, for instance in motion perception, processing of words and local metabolic activity.

It has become clear that to reveal the mechanisms of human biological processes we need to break technical barriers by moving to 14T.

Synchronized with the NWO roadmap “MRI and cognition” we reached the final stage for the large scale infrastructure grant with a successful interview, yet the permanent committee decided, compared to other proposals, that our project was considered as too much technical risk with respect to the relatively high funds that were requested.

To maintain our position as frontrunner in cognition and MRI, while minimizing the technical risk of the roadmap in conjunction with securing co-funding strategies to lower the budget request to NWO, we urgently request a financial continuation support for two years.

By merging expertise from the consortium to focus on the most advanced experimental MRI systems available, we will be able to initiate a technological step to enable understanding of human cognition.