Jan. 29, 2021 – The National Institute of Health BRAIN Initiative and the Department of Energy’s Office of Science will hold virtual workshops in February and March exploring brain connectivity.
Generating complete maps of mammalian brains is a scientific grand challenge that will require a multi-disciplinary, science-at-scale approach, the agencies said in their announcement, bringing together expertise from neuroscience, imaging, advanced computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning and large-scale data management and analysis. The scientific discoveries and new capabilities that result from the effort will have broad benefit – not only to human health and wellbeing, but to other areas of science and technology, including materials science, plant biology, and next-generation computing, among many others.
The five workshops will bring together researchers to discuss the state of the art in mapping whole neural circuits, current opportunities for advancing technologies in mammalian whole-brain connectomics, and the challenges of generating maps of brain connectivity that span the entire brain.
The series includes five sub-topics:
- February 5: Significance of mapping complete neural circuits
- February 17: Sample preparation in mammalian whole-brain connectomics
- March 5: Experimental modalities for whole-brain connectivity mapping
- March 17: Connectome generation and data pipelines
- March 31: Optimizing connectomic data to drive data science and scientific discovery
Registration for the workshop is free. See the series website at https://brainconnectivityseries.com/
