Quantum Research at the ARC
Breaking boundaries in brain health
What if understanding the brain were as accessible as checking your heart rate on a smartwatch? Professor Daniele Faccio and his team at the University of Glasgow are working on making that thought a reality.
The Human Augmentation Lab (HAL) are working towards a bold vision: developing next-generation wearable brain imaging technology that could bring the power of functional MRI (fMRI) out of specialist hospitals and into everyday life.
Today, fMRI is one of the most powerful tools for understanding how the brain works. Yet despite its enormous potential, it is expensive, available only in specialist clinical settings, and inaccessible to many people who could benefit from it. Professor Faccio wants to change that.
A new future for brain health
His team, made up of engineers, physicists and neuroscientists, are developing what he describes as wearable technology capable of decoding brain states at a fraction of the cost of conventional scanning.
The long-term goal is a lightweight wearable, perhaps integrated into a cap or glasses, that could monitor brain health in real time. This has the potential to transform care for people living with conditions such as ADHD and depression, which are increasingly understood as disorders of brain network communication rather than disorders affecting isolated brain regions.
For depression in particular, wearable brain imaging could help dramatically improve treatment. Finding the right medication often takes months, sometimes years, of trying different drugs. Real-time brain monitoring could potentially shorten that process from months to weeks.
Professor Daniele Faccio, ARC Winter Cinema.
Where giving drives discovery
Research this ambitious rarely attracts conventional funding.
That is partly because Professor Faccio's work sits between disciplines: photonics, AI, physics, neuroscience and healthcare. As he puts it: “If you can understand all of the words and terminology used by the other people in the room, then you are in the wrong room.” It is precisely these unexpected connections that spark new ideas. And it is precisely this collision of disciplines that creates the conditions for breakthrough discovery, and where your support has extraordinary impact.
Thanks to you, Professor Faccio's team can pursue bold, unconventional research, particularly by supporting cross-disciplinary PhD students and early-career researchers who bridge disciplines in ways traditional academic structures rarely allow.
One of Professor Faccio's proudest career moments came last year, when a donor-funded PhD student successfully grew and measured the lab's first neuronal culture. This would be routine in many neuroscience labs but for a physics group that pivoted from black hole research only a few years ago, it marked something extraordinary: “It was the first real sign that we are truly working at the boundary between physics and brain science.”
If you can understand all of the words and terminology used by the other people in the room, then you are in the wrong room" Professor Daniele Faccio.
Investing in people
For Professor Faccio, donor support is about more than funding equipment or experiments. It creates the conditions for entirely new ways of thinking.
Mansa, a Postgraduate Research (PGR) student, told us: “My PhD at the intersection of neuroscience and quantum photonics puts me in a unique position to translate ideas between the two fields. As a researcher, having access to expertise and resources in both disciplines enables me to probe novel biological pathways by developing bespoke novel neurotechnologies.”
Kris, also a PGR student, said: “Coming from a physics background, I never expected my PhD to involve working so closely with neuroscientists. Developing neuroscience technologies has shown me how bringing together different disciplines can lead to entirely new ways of studying the brain. Having the opportunity to work across these fields, supported by donor funding, has allowed me to develop skills and collaborations that wouldn’t have been possible within a single discipline.”
By backing talented researchers to work across disciplines, you are helping drive discovery at the edge of possibility, supporting research with the potential to transform how we understand the brain, improve treatment, change and, ultimately, save lives.
Make discovery possible
Support the next breakthrough in world-changing research. Your gift can help empower bold ideas, nurture pioneering researchers and accelerate discoveries that could transform lives.