Background

John Ngai, PhD, has served as Director of the NIH BRAIN Initiative since March 2020, leading the multi-billion-dollar federal research programme aimed at developing tools to understand the brain and to translate that understanding into treatments for brain dysfunction.

Education and academic career

Ngai earned his bachelor’s degree in chemistry and biology from Pomona College in Claremont, California, and his PhD in biology from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena. He completed postdoctoral research at Caltech and at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons before starting his faculty position at UC Berkeley.

During more than 25 years as a Berkeley faculty member, Ngai built a research programme focused on the neural basis of olfaction (the sense of smell), including fundamental research on how the nervous system detects odours and converts them into neural signals. His lab also worked on understanding cell-type diversity in the brain and on the question of how the nervous system repairs itself following injury or degeneration.

NIH BRAIN Initiative leadership

As BRAIN Initiative Director, Ngai has overseen the programme’s progression from its early tool-development phase into a more integrative phase combining large-scale data, AI, and clinical translation. On 15 May 2026, Ngai jointly announced (with Acting NINDS Director Amy Bany Adams) the formal publication of the BRAIN Initiative’s 10-year Neuroscience Research Roadmap in the journal Neuron. The roadmap is organised around four interconnected Innovation Domains: the BRAIN Knowledgebase, Precision Molecular Circuit Therapies, Accelerating Human Neuroscience, and BRAIN NeuroAI. The framework was finalised in August 2025 and represents the strategic direction for federally-funded US neuroscience research through 2035.

The NIH BRAIN Initiative has invested more than $3.5 billion in neuroscience research since 2014.