With a founding gift from campaign honorary chair Joseph C. Tsai ’86, ’90 JD, and his wife, Clara Wu Tsai, the Wu Tsai Institute opened its doors at 100 College Street in 2023. Dedicated to questions of cognition and human performance, the Wu Tsai Institute bridges the psychological, biological, and computational sciences with the goal of revealing the human brain in its full, dynamic complexity. The institute draws on researchers and clinicians from Yale School of Medicine and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to explore the brain at every scale, from molecule to mind.

Our first neurons form during the earliest weeks of development in the womb. As the brain takes shape, those neurons move about and cluster with others to create brain regions.

Then they begin the essential work of connection, following chemical trails to reach each other—sometimes stretching short distances, other times reaching far across the brain. Millions of these connections form every minute, as billions of neurons fasten together in trillions of ways.

Today, Yale’s Wu Tsai Institute is following a similar developmental trajectory. Its researchers are settling and forming connections, crossing fields and forging networks, to help understand the most astounding product of the brain—human cognition.

The Wu Tsai Institute was built for cross-disciplinary innovation. Made up of three symbiotic centers—addressing development and plasticity, cognition and behavior, and computation and machine intelligence—it acts as a metaphorical and physical bridge across scientific disciplines.

Faculty members in the institute hail from more than 30 departments across Yale School of Medicine, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the School of Engineering and Applied Science, as well as the School of Public Health and Yale Law School.

Through its core facilities, labs, classrooms, collaborative spaces, and intentional community building, the Wu Tsai Institute brings researchers together to find surprising avenues for exploration and discovery. And its interdisciplinary recruiting and mentoring efforts aim to expand the ranks of exceptional researchers who think differently about cognition.

“The advantage we have is that we can recruit faculty, postdocs, and students in support of an inherently interdisciplinary mission, not for an individual area of study,” said Nick Turk-Browne, the institute’s director and the Susan Nolen-Hoeksema Professor of Psychology. “So we can get researchers at the ‘edge’ who are tapping into different fields to answer complex questions — using graph theory to understand brain networks, explaining behavior through brain-body interactions, engineering brains with synthetic biology.”