Conceptualised by Lord David Sainsbury in partnership with the Wellcome Trust, SWC was officially opened on 23 May 2016 by Nobel Laureate Professor Eric Kandel.

[12][13][14] SWC was involved in a collaboration to develop the Neuropixels probes with scientists at HHMI Janelia Research Campus, the Allen Institute for Brain Science and UCL, and engineers at imec.

[15] In September 2018, Professor John O’Keefe spoke at the Schrödinger at 75 conference about his lab’s work to develop simple tests of spatial awareness that could allow doctors to detect early signs of Alzheimer’s disease.

[18] In July 2021, SWC Group Leader Athena Akrami and the Patient Led Research Collaborative published the largest international study of Long COVID to date which identified over 200 symptoms across 10 organ systems.

[23][24][25] The Sainsbury Wellcome Centre runs a four-year PhD programme taught by faculty at SWC, the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, and affiliated institutions including UCL.