The Human Brain Project, which is coordinated by the National Institute of Mental Health, was established in 1993 to fund research in the new field of neuroinformatics.
Informatics is the science of handling information.
The best example of bioinformatics, says Gordon Shepherd, professor of neuroscience at Yale School of Medicine , is the sequencing of genes and proteins in the human genome project. Neuroinformatics has as its goal to do the same for other kinds of data in neuroscience. One innovation is a special database where users can deposit unpublished sequences and run searches to detect whether there are other similar sequences still unpublished. The two laboratories can then communicate on the steps to be taken to finish the job. Miller and his colleagues construct the databases and carry out fundamental research on database architectures and tools.