Janelia Research Campus is a scientific research campus of the

Howard Hughes Medical Institute The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is an American non-profit medical research organization based in Chevy Chase, Maryland. It was founded in 1953 by Howard Hughes, an American business magnate, investor, record-setting pilot, engineer, fil ...

that opened in October 2006. The campus is located in Loudoun County, Virginia, near the town of

Ashburn __NOTOC__ Ashburn may refer to: Places Canada *Ashburn, Ontario United States *Ashburn, Georgia *Ashburn, Chicago, Illinois, a community area **Ashburn (Metra), a Metra station serving the area * Ashburn, Missouri * Ashburn, Virginia, an unincorpo ...

. It is known for its scientific research and modern architecture. The current executive director of the laboratory is

Ronald Vale Ronald David Vale (born 1959) is a biochemist and cell biologist. He is a professor at the Department of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, University of California, San Francisco. His research is focused on motor proteins, particularly kinesi ...

, who is also a vice-president of HHMI. He succeeded

Gerald M. Rubin Gerald Mayer Rubin (born 1950) is an American biologist, notable for pioneering the use of transposable P elements in genetics, and for leading the public project to sequence the ''Drosophila melanogaster'' genome. Related to his genomics wo ...

in 2020. The campus was known as "Janelia Farm Research Campus" until 2014.

Research

Most HHMI-funded research supports investigators working at their home institutions. However, some interdisciplinary problems are difficult to address in existing research settings, and Janelia was built as a separate institution to address such problems in neurobiology. As of November 2011, it had 424 employees and room for 150 more. They specifically address the identification of general principles governing information processing by

neuronal circuit A neural circuit is a population of neurons interconnected by synapses to carry out a specific function when activated. Neural circuits interconnect to one another to form large scale brain networks. Biological neural networks have inspired the ...

s, and the development of imaging technologies and computational methods for

image analysis Image analysis or imagery analysis is the extraction of meaningful information from images; mainly from digital images by means of digital image processing techniques. Image analysis tasks can be as simple as reading bar coded tags or as sophi ...

. In 2017, it announced a new research area, mechanistic cognitive neuroscience. At any given time, Janelia supports several large collaborative projects to address needs for data and techniques of interest to a wide scientific community. As of 2021, these included the development of large-scale neuroanatomical data for ''Drosophila'' (at the light and electron microscopy levels), a corresponding light level map of the mouse brain, improving the technology of genetically coded fluorescent sensors, and a number of smaller projects. Results include much improved fluorescent calcium sensors and the first entire full-brain image of ''Drosophila'' with neuronal resolution. The center was designed to emulate the unconstrained and collaborative environments at

AT&T Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

and Cambridge's Laboratory of Molecular Biology. Researchers are on six-year contracts and fully internally funded, independent of traditional

research grant A grant is a fund given by an end entity grant – often a public body, charitable foundation, or a specialised grant-making institution – to an individual or another entity (usually, a non-profit organisation, sometimes a business or a local ...

funding.

was the first executive director of Janelia, and saw it from concept through construction to operation.

took over as director in early 2020. There are roughly fifty research laboratories headed by senior researchers including

Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz Jennifer Lippincott-Schwartz is a Senior Group Leader at Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus and a founding member of the Neuronal Cell Biology Program at Janelia. Previously, she was the Chief of the Section on Organelle ...

, Gerry Rubin, Eric Betzig, Karel Svoboda and

Barry Dickson Barry J. Dickson (born 14 August 1962) is an Australian neurobiologist who studies the development of neuronal networks in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Dickson is a group leader at the Janelia Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medic ...

. Previous lab heads include

Sean Eddy Sean Roberts Eddy is Professor of Molecular & Cellular Biology and of Applied Mathematics at Harvard University. Previously he was based at the Janelia Research Campus from 2006 to 2015 in Virginia. His research interests are in bioinformatics, ...

, Tamir Gonen, Lynn Riddiford,

James W. Truman James "Jim" William Truman is an American chronobiologist known for his seminal research on circadian rhythms in silkmoth ( Saturniidae) eclosion, particularly the restoration of rhythm and phase following brain transplantation. He is a professo ...

, and

Robert Tjian Robert Tjian (; born 1949) is a Hong Kong-born American biochemist best known for his work on eukaryotic transcription. He is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of California, Berkeley and an Investigator ...

Campus

The original Janelia Farm house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and the property was purchased by HHMI from the Dutch software maker Baan Companies in December 2000. The main campus features a 900-foot (270 m) long, arc-shaped laboratory known as the Landscape Building. The building, designed by

Rafael Viñoly Rafael Viñoly Beceiro (born 1944) is a Uruguayan architect. He is the principal of Rafael Viñoly Architects, which he founded in 1983. The firm has offices in New York City, Palo Alto, London, Manchester, Abu Dhabi, and Buenos Aires. Viñ ...

, wide at the ground floor, is built into a hill and designed to be the primary research facility. A 96 room hotel for conference attendees overlooks a pond and connects to the Landscape Building via a tunnel under Helix drive.

Selden Island Selden Island is a 408-acre island in the Potomac River, located about WNW of Washington, DC. It is about 4 km long and 0.4–0.5 km wide (2.5 x 1/4–1/3 miles). Although it is located within Montgomery County, Maryland, the only roa ...

, a former sod farm in the Potomac River was added to the campus in 2004 and is popular amongst staff for jogging and recreation. Many employees live on campus. There are three apartment buildings totaling 240 units—34 single-family townhouses and 21 studio apartments providing housing for more than a quarter of the staff. Other employees commute to Arlington on an HHMI provided shuttle bus. There are extensive fitness facilities, including a yoga studio, bouldering gym, tennis courts, and a soccer field. Site and landscape design were completed by Dewberry in 2006 and include over four acres of green roof meadow plantings which blend the building into the surrounding site. In 2006, the institute hired landscape architecture firm Lewis Scully Gionet, Inc., to redo some of the previous landscape work which was completed in fall 2008 (and won an Honor Award from the Maryland and Potomac chapters of the American Society of Landscape Architects). This work includes an architectural water feature, expanded path network, and siting of multiple pieces of artwork, as well as comprehensive planting additions. Additional campus-wide landscape improvement designed by LSG Landscape Architecture followed up until now.

Research Facilities

Computational infrastructure

The storage and computational requirements of modern neuroscience can be extremely demanding. Some two-photon microscopes can generate data at over 5 GB/s.

Electron microscopy An electron microscope is a microscope that uses a beam of accelerated electrons as a source of illumination. As the wavelength of an electron can be up to 100,000 times shorter than that of visible light photons, electron microscopes have a hi ...

connectomics can be especially demanding. The FlyEM dataset alone is a 400 TB, 34431 x 39743 x 41407 64-bit image. The analysis of a similar dataset took nearly 7000 GPU hours. Computational infrastructure available to researchers at Janelia includes a high performance 7000 core

cluster may refer to: Science and technology Astronomy * Cluster (spacecraft), constellation of four European Space Agency spacecraft * Asteroid cluster, a small asteroid family * Cluster II (spacecraft), a European Space Agency mission to study t ...

, 5 petabytes of storage and an off-site data center where data is backed up nightly.

Animal facilities

An accredited vivarium houses laboratory animals including zebrafish, mice, and rats. Support staff assist with routine care, breeding, and surgeries. Routine care is aided by automation. Several fly flipping robots help maintain '' Drosophila'' stocks by transferring them to vials of fresh food. Two robot arms aid in the sanitation of mouse cages. One arm picks dirty cages from a stack and inserts them into an autoclave, the other removes sanitized cages and stacks them.

Advanced Imaging Center

Scientists from around the world can apply to run their experiments on Janelia developed microscopes at the Advanced Imaging Center.

Community involvement

Together with the Loudoun Academy of Science, HHMI donates approximately $1 million annually to support science education throughout Loudoun County Public Schools. Janelia also hosts a quarterly lecture series for members of the public.