Despite its importance, biomedical research on consciousness lacks shared standards, resulting in fragmented efforts and limiting understanding of underlying neurocircuitry. To accelerate rigorous, reproducible, and ethically grounded research, this initiative will create a national interdisciplinary Research Network to strengthen and integrate consciousness-related neuroscience, rather than support discrete, hypothesis-driven projects. The Network will develop coordination frameworks, standards, and infrastructure, uniting expertise from neuroscience, neurology, psychiatry, psychology, anesthesiology, sleep and meditation research, computational science, AI, bioethics, and philosophy.

The Network’s goal is capacity building: developing and providing needed research resources to advance understanding of the neural mechanisms supporting conscious states. It will lead planning and consensus-building activities to:

• Harmonize operational definitions across consciousness research.
• Identify research settings, model systems, and experimental designs with the greatest potential.
• Evaluate indicators and measures of consciousness for diverse scientific approaches.
• Determine which measures best reflect preserved or perturbed neurobiological function.
• Address essential ethical considerations.

To strengthen U.S. leadership and cultivate a highly trained workforce, the Network will provide interdisciplinary cross-training opportunities, such as workshops and visiting scholar programs, not feasible in siloed environments. This initiative will create resources that enable rigorous biomedical research on the neural mechanisms of conscious states, aligning with NIH's strategic priorities to improve population health and well-being.