EBRAINS research infrastructure secures €38 million in funding for new phase of digital neuroscience

Ghent University is part of a consortium that secured €38 million in funding for the development of the second phase of EBRAINS. EBRAINS (European Brain Research Infrastructures) is an EU co-funded collaborative research platform designed to advance neuroscience and brain health. Developed as a legacy of the Human Brain Project, EBRAINS is a digital ecosystem where researchers, clinicians, and experts converge to explore the complexity of the brain at various scales. With a focus on creating tools, models, and workflows, EBRAINS facilitates research on brain organisation, disease mechanisms, and biomarkers. It supports the development of computational disease models, fostering collaboration, and promoting diversity and inclusion in neuroscience. The overarching goal is to deepen the understanding of brain structure and function, leading to advancements in brain medicine, technology, and computing.

Digital twins

The new project EBRAINS 2.0 will further the development and provision of the infrastructure’s research technologies to the scientific community. It aims to establish a new standard for brain atlases, and to gather and connect multimodal neuroscientific and clinical data. Another key part of BRAINS 2.0 is to push forward the development of digital twin approaches. Digital twins is a type of personalised computational brain model that can be constantly updated with measured real-world data obtained from its real-life counterpart, i.e., the patient. The Ghent University group led by Prof. Daniele Marinazzo will play a crucial role in a task called "operate digital twins", aimed at validating the models using statistical inference, and at producing reproducible workflows.

About EBRAINS

The EBRAINS research infrastructure, a key outcome and legacy of the EU-funded Human Brain Project (HBP), was officially launched in 2019. Two years later, in 2021, EBRAINS was included in the Roadmap of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI). In this next phase, after the recent conclusion of the HBP, EBRAINS will complete the transition into a sustainable infrastructure.

"The grant agreement marks an important milestone for the EBRAINS research infrastructure,. We look forward to further developing our tools and services, to share it with our colleagues and empower the community to make progress in neuroscience", says Katrin Amunts, who became Joint Chief Executive Officer of the EBRAINS AISBL in September 2023 and led the writing of the successful EBRAINS 2.0 proposal

“We are delighted to have been awarded the SERV grant. It is a recognition of the sustainable scientific value of the research infrastructure.", says Philippe Vernier, Joint Chief Executive Officer of EBRAINS

 The project involves 59 partner institutions from 16 European countries. It was selected for funding after evaluation by independent experts. It is coordinated by the EBRAINS AISBL, a non-profit organisation founded in Brussels during the Human Brain Project, and starts in January 2024. The Research Infrastructure is organised around a central hub that coordinates a pan-European network of services delivered through currently 11 National Nodes: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland.

EBRAINS tools

EBRAINS is an open research infrastructure that gathers high-quality research data, tools and computing facilities for brain-related research, built with interoperability at the core. The infrastructure offers an extensive range of brain data sets, a multilevel brain atlas, modelling and simulation tools, and access to high-performance computing resources and robotics and neuromorphic platforms to researchers.

Explore the tools and services here

Contact

• Daniele Marinazzo, daniele.marinazzo@ugent.be