Fairfax Financial Holdings, a leading Canadian financial company founded by Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras Alumnus Prem Watsa, is going to support the research activities of IIT Madras’ Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre through a research grant of $5 million (approximately Rs 41 crore).

The Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre was launched in March 2022 to power an ambitious Global Project to image the human brain at the cellular levels by generating unprecedented human brain data, scientific output and technology tools.

Commending the research underway at this Centre, Prem Watsa, Founder, Chairman, and Chief Executive Officer of Fairfax Financial Holdings, said, “The quality of work and the team’s commitment at IIT-M’s Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre is truly outstanding. The technology platform they have developed that generates high-resolution image volumes of human brains is very unique. It has far reaching impact in advancing our knowledge of human brains, developing insights that will lead to solutions for highly challenging brain diseases.”

The IIT Madras Sudha Gopalakrishnan Brain Centre has developed a world-class high-throughput histology pipeline that processes whole human brains into high-resolution digital images at petabyte-scale. These unique first-in-class data sets of human brains of different types and ages provide an unprecedented high-resolution view of human brains that reveal cellular level details across the entire brain. This data is being studied by globally leading neuroscience experts for new knowledge and discovery.

The donation was facilitated by the Canadian Friends of IIT-Madras (CFIITM), a Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) registered charity that seeks to advance the cause of IIT-Madras among its Canadian alumni and Canadian society at large.