WVU Medicine
Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute
Innovation Center

  • Morgantown, West Virginia
  • Completed May 2019
  • Renovation & Addition
  • 60,000 square feet

BREAKING BARRIERS

Understanding the mind is understanding the complexity of being human. Our minds are places of wonder, excitement, determination, compassion, and kindness. Our minds are also vulnerable to human experiences that are more difficult to grasp: Alzheimer’s Disease, depression, addiction, and traumatic brain injuries (TBI).

The Innovation Center at Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute creates the dynamic human experience needed to demystify these unexplored and unexplained aspects of the human brain in the ill, elite performing, and general population. This interdisciplinary habitat accommodates the needs of both well and ill patients who seek answers to the treatment of pervasive neurological disorders.

This is a home for self-reflection. When visitors enter the lobby, they cross a threshold of discovery into a space that lets the mind and body wander. The two-story atrium is enlivened by a large-scale neuroimage by artist and neuroscientist Dr. Greg Dunn. Self Reflection captures a sagittal brain slice at the level of the neuron, the most precise vector-imaging of the brain in existence.

A collaborative “Mind Gym” offers an innovative habitat for multidisciplinary exploration of the brain’s reaction time. Technology installations bridge the gap between research and clinical worlds, notably the High-Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) facility that bears credit to the first-ever non-invasive Alzheimer’s Treatment by combining HIFU with MRI.

This is a home for transparency. Natural, tactile details fill the space and offer a fluid transition from one room to the next. The expanded clinical environments give priority to patient experience and world-class treatment with large collaborative control rooms for observation.

Unlike most research and clinical environments, this facility leans into the subjectivity and
ambiguity of human thought and behavior. Without compromising its advanced capabilities and technologies, the RNI environment fights darkness with light and celebrates the science of the most powerful and unpredictable resource available to us, the human mind.

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