For the past fifteen years, the FPR has funded culture, brain, and development programs at Hampshire College and UCLA, and a series of transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary workshops, conferences, and publications bringing together neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, and psychiatry. As a private operating foundation, our giving has largely focused on fostering interdisciplinary collaboration by cross-training and mentoring the next generation of researchers, “with an emphasis on cultural processes as central.” A steady stream of transdisciplinary conferences and publications have supplemented this approach by focusing on topics such as trauma and mental illness that are of fundamental social and clinical concern.

We’ve reached the end of our final funding cycles for the educational programs we created at Hampshire College and UCLA and are convening this meeting to discuss what to fund over the next 5-10 years. Tentatively, the schedule is as follows.

Initially, we’ll will focus on what we’ve learned. We’ll discuss some of the successes and challenges of the past fifteen years in (1) establishing an interdisciplinary framework with a solid empirical and logistical foundation for advancing research and training the next generation of CMB researchers, (2) producing high quality, integrative research, and (3) connecting with audiences through peer-reviewed journals, edited volumes, and social media.

We will also consider positive developments more generally, for example, the growing acceptance of brain-body-environment as a unit of analysis, the proliferation of global, collaborative initiatives in brain science, and, closer to home, the growth of “culture, mind, and brain” and related programs in the US, Canada, Europe, China, Japan, and Australia. More broadly, we will discuss the evolving concept of “culture” and other emergent issues, and also consider what’s on the horizon in terms of new theories, methods, and applications for understanding brain-mind-body-behavior-environment.

Finally, we will ask the group to propose some “proactive strategies” to address the difficulties we’ve identified and consider various suggestions for new programs and other funding opportunities.