With a neuroscientific community already strongly involved in the Human Brain Project (HBP), one of the two flagship initiatives of the European Union's Future and Emerging Technologies, it is quite natural that Aix-Marseille Université joined EBRAINS as an associate member.
Aix-Marseille Université strengthens its contribution to the European research landscape by joining EBRAINS, a new digital research infrastructure, created by the HBP and partly funded by the European Union, which brings together a wide range of data and tools for brain research.
Effective since January 1, 2022, this associate membership status gives AMU the opportunity to co-design future versions of the state-of-the-art tools and services offered by EBRAINS. These cutting-edge capabilities aim to help European researchers address major challenges in brain health, benefiting from insights into data science, brain organization and artificial intelligence gathered in the Human Brain Project. These include data sharing, atlasing, modeling, simulation, high performance computing and neurorobotics.
This collaboration represents a natural step for Professor Viktor Jirsa, Director of the Institute of Systems Neuroscience (UMR1106 Inserm/AMU), who already uses the EBRAINS research infrastructure to boost the accuracy of the Virtual Epileptic Patient (VEP), a computational tool which allows scientists to locate the areas in a patient’s brain where epilepsy seizures emerge. Upon confirmation of membership, Professor Jirsa commented, "We are proud to be a member of the EBRAINS family. Digital Neuroscience is the most promising avenue nowadays to address pressing questions in brain health, notably epilepsy, mental health and neurodegeneration. As we want to go far with our ambitions, we need to go together. The EBRAINS ecosystem is the way of doing so."
This collaboration also promises to be fruitful on the EBRAINS side, with CEO Paweł Świeboda announcing: "We are happy to welcome Aix-Marseille Université. It brings with it an impressive record of achievement in brain modelling and simulation which will help to take the EBRAINS services to a new level, to the benefit of the broader research community ".
Discover the testimonies of other researchers below about the importance of this partnership for their research, as well as their contribution to the Human Brain Project :
| Researcher | Laboratory | Testimonial |
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Pr. Maxime Guye Expertise: Neuroimaging and MRI |
Biological and Medical Magnetic Resonance Center | "This partnership offers the opportunity to collaborate with outstanding multidisciplinary scientists and to enhance the value of our neuroimaging data made widely available through EBRAINS in which we contribute by providing a unique dataset of whole-brain multimodal and multiscale quantitative parameters specifically designed to enable testing and validation of personalised HBP multiscale brain models." |
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Associate Professor Stéphane Delliaux Expertise: Digital Sciences for Health |
Center for Cardiovascular and Nutrition Research (C2VN) and the Laënnec Institute | "This partnership is crucial to benefit from the highly cutting-edge knowledge from a world leading project to extend digital sciences to health beyond the only brain. We are catalysers of digital health development and valorization of hardware (instrumentation) and software (medical decision making support) digital technologies, research and care databases, and works in ethics, law, and customs." |
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Dr. Andrea Brovelli Expertise: Computational cognitive neuroscience |
Institute of Neurosciences of Timone |
"In HBP, I coordinate a research task developing data-driven and model-based approaches for the analysis and modeling of interactions between brain regions during cognitive processes. Our aim is to share developments on EBRAINS, including computational and neuroinformatics tools, for the inference of cognitive functional connectivity from human brain data and validation of models based on such empirical information." |
- Discover EBRAINS
- Learn more about the Human Brain Project
- Discover the Virtual Brain Facility Hub, a contribution of Aix-Marseille Université to the new European digital research infrastructure EBRAINS.