PHILADELPHIA PA -- Congressman Chaka Fattah (D-PA-02), a leading Congressional advocate for federally sponsored research, will deliver a speech in suburban Philadelphia and tour a national laboratory in Tennessee on Monday to advance his science-centered agenda.

The author of the Fattah Neuroscience Initiative to raise the federal priority and coordination of research on the brain will update a group of neuroscientists and academics about his work at the Penn Center for Brain Injury and Repair Retreat at the Radnor Hotel in Wayne PA on Monday morning.

Following the speech Fattah, a champion for the national laboratory system, will fly to Tennessee for a tour and briefing of nuclear related facilities at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Fattah last month introduced legislation declaring 2013 “The Year of the Federal Lab.”

Oak Ridge marks Fattah’s sixth visit to a national laboratory in the past two years. He previously toured NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, Calif.; the Los Alamos and Sandia Labs in New Mexico and the Argonne and Fermi national labs in the Chicago area. 

Fattah has spotlighted neuroscience research, brain injury and treatment as a legislative priority during the current Congress. In December 2011 he won bipartisan Congressional approval to raise the national priority of neuroscience and to coordinate multi-agency research in the White House Office of Science and Technology, via the Interagency Working Group on Neuroscience.

“In many respects the brain represents the final frontier of scientific research,” Fattah said. “Brain injuries affect 11 million Americans and over seven million more, many of them school children, suffer various learning disabilities.

“Our nation must have the best efforts of every citizen, and yet we have an often-disjointed and under-funded approach to injuries, treatment and diseases of the brain,” Fattah said. “We’re making strides. I welcome the opportunity to address this distinguished scientific group brought together by Penn to discuss public policy issues of brain science.”

The Fattah Neuroscience Initiative’s broader goal is to make major progress in understanding the human brain by intensifying, in a collaborative fashion, federal research efforts across brain disease, disorder, injury, cognition and development. The initiative aims to coordinate Federal research across agencies and draw upon public-private partnerships and the world of academia. The initiative promotes research and discovery across brain cognition, development, disease and injury.

Fattah in the past 13 months has visited more than a dozen neuroscience facilities in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Cambridge, Mass., St. Louis and Washington D.C., consulting with scientists, doctors, professors and others in the field. Many of his site visits have been in his hometown of Philadelphia, a major center of neuroscience research at Penn, Thomas Jefferson University, The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and other facilities in or near his home 2^nd Congressional District.