Child Mind Institute’s Healthy Brain Network Receives $1 Million Grant From the Stavros Niarchos Foundation

Grant Will Be Used to Fund Innovative Mobile Research Vehicle

NEW YORK, NY, June 1, 2015 — The Child Mind Institute received a $1 million grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation for the Healthy Brain Network (HBN), a groundbreaking initiative which intends to revolutionize child and adolescent psychiatry by providing the scientific community with an open source, unprecedentedly rich, large-scale dataset, while improving access to mental health resources in New York City and beyond. The grant will be used to fund the HBN Research Vehicle which is the cornerstone of the initiative’s community-based model.

“The Child Mind Institute is grateful for this extraordinary grant,” said Founder and President Dr. Harold Koplewicz. “The Stavros Niarchos Foundation has been an integral partner of ours from the beginning and this grant further shows their commitment to transformative scientific research and innovative models of mental health care delivery – all to the benefit of children struggling with mental illness.”

This is the second grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation for the Child Mind Institute’s science program. In 2010, they funded the launch of the Child Mind Institute’s Scientific Research Council, made up of 15 distinguished scientists from the field of child and adolescent mental health, and helped to establish the Child Mind Institute’s multi-disciplinary, innovative science program.

The Stavros Niarchos Foundation 2010 grant laid the groundwork for the formation of the Healthy Brain Network, which aims to build the largest, most comprehensive database on the developing brain of children with mental illness and learning disorders. The data will be shared openly with multi-disciplinary researchers around the world to stimulate analysis and generate hypotheses for further discovery. It is a novel approach using big data and open science that in time will lead to transformative change in the way clinicians test, diagnose and treat mental illnesses.

In the process of collecting the data, the Child Mind Institute will provide free mental health evaluations and care coordination to 10,000 children in the NYC-metro area, who may not otherwise have access to such a valuable resource. The HBN Research Vehicle will be tested as a mental health care delivery model that can be replicated in urban and rural settings across the world.