Former Congressman Patrick Kennedy has bought a house on a small island off New Jersey’s Atlantic coast, WPRI.com has learned.

Kennedy recently purchased the home in Brigantine, N.J., but still plans to keep his farmhouse here in Portsmouth, a person close to him told WPRI.com. The newly retired congressman is dividing his time between Rhode Island, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., the person said.

Brigantine is located northeast of Atlantic City and has 9,450 residents, according to last year’s U.S. Census. Its population includes a mix of wealthier homeowners with seaside properties and middle-class families who work in the neighboring casino mecca, the person said.

Kennedy’s presence in Brigantine was separately confirmed by employees at the city assessor’s office and a local newspaper. The assessor’s office said the property he bought is not registered under his name.

The Kennedy family fortune is managed by the Park Agency, a private office in New York City that patriarch Joseph Kennedy established in the 1940s.

Since leaving office in January, Patrick Kennedy has been devoting his time to an energetic effort to promote research into neuroscience, including illnesses like depression, addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder.

Kennedy and Harvard University Provost Steven Hyman are scheduled to hold a meeting this Thursday at the White House with Obama administration officials to discuss his brain research initiatives, the person said.

Kennedy has created an organization called The Next Frontier that will work to promote and coordinate brain research. Its efforts will kick off with a conference in Boston in May. He has also accepted a two-year visiting fellowship at Brown University’s Institute for Brain Science, where he will maintain an office and deliver two lectures a year.

“Millions of people live with disorders of the brain and central nervous system and hundreds of thousands of American soldiers and veterans have suffered traumatic brain injuries,” Kennedy said in a statement issued by Brown. “Finding treatments and cures for their suffering is a national emergency with a scientific challenge akin to our efforts to go to the moon that galvanized the country half a century ago.”

Kennedy is also working on a memoir, “Coming Clean,” that is scheduled to be released on Nov. 8 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. His co-author is former Washington Post reporter Mary Ann Akers. He attended the annual Providence Newspaper Guild Follies in Swansea last month, too.

Rhode Island has at least one connection with Brigantine in addition to Kennedy – Ilya, a manatee that swam into Rhode Island waters in September 2009, was eventually transported to the city’s Marine Mammal Stranding Center en route to Florida.