Richard Gershon has a shiny new toolbox for neuroscientists that will revolutionize their clinical research by making it radically faster, cheaper and more accurate. It also will help researchers recruit children and adults for studies because participation will be much less time consuming.

On Sept. 10 and 11, Gershon will introduce the new NIH Toolbox to hundreds of researchers at a special National Institutes of Health (NIH) conference in Bethesda, Maryland. At the end of September, he will give away the tools for free to NIH researchers.

Gershon, an associate professor of medical social sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, has led an ambitious six-year NIH-funded study reflecting the efforts of 235 scientists around the world that provides the first common measurements for neurological and behavioral health. Currently, one researcher’s test to measure depression, for example, isn’t the same as another’s, so their study results aren’t comparable. Research is built on others’ findings so this hodgepodge mires progress.