Constructed in the early 1980s for the Natural Environment Council's Institute of Virology, today it is home to the Centre for Neural Circuits and Behaviour (CNCB), an autonomous research centre embedded in the University of Oxford.  The CNCB website explains that, "... The building's style sits somewhere between more strictly modernist works of the early 1970s and the relatively integrated and contextual designs of the later 1980s and 1990s. Geoffrey Tyack's 1998 architectural guide to Oxford notes that, in comparison to earlier modernist buildings in the Science Area, the Tinsley Building's 'restrained brick elevations and pitched slate roofs are more humanely scaled'. Strong vertical elements and distinctive horizontal layering echo the Mansfield College Chapel opposite."