Shantanu Chakrabartty, the Clifford Murphy Professor in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, recently received a $380,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to address a persistent problem when it comes to recreating the brain’s neuronal networks in silicon: energy efficiency. This is known as the “neuron-to-network energy gap.” His research also will address the fact that biological brains are general purpose while computers are specialty machines, doing one thing at a time.