EBRAINS research infrastructure secures €38 million in funding for new phase of digital neuroscience
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The European Commission has signed a grant agreement to fund EBRAINS with €38 million until 2026. Over the next three years, the infrastructure will develop tools and services to widely serve research communities in neurosciences, brain medicine, and brain-inspired technologies.
The project
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 and to derive therefrom new solutions for brain medicine and technology.
The new project 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, gather and connect multimodal neuroscientific and clinical data, and push forward the development of digital twin approaches.
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.
CINECA’S role in the project
CINECA, Associate Member of EBRIANS AISBL and partner of EBRAINS Italian National Node, is committed to continue the support to european neuroscience community activities provided in the last 10 years during the Human Brain Project.
In this project, CINECA will coordinate the maintenance, update and integration of operational services deployed through the base infrastructure, including storage, cloud, and high-performance computing resources, and will be responsible for preparing the technical specifications for the procurement of dedicated base infrastructure cloud resources, supporting the sites at all steps of the procurement process on a technical level, and hosting and operating these resources, in close collaboration with Forschungszentrum Jülich.
Additionally, CINECA will be strongly involved to organise, initiate and operate the EBRAINS support structure and to coordinate other EBRAINS support activities, covering the co-leading role.
The involvement in the project will allow CINECA to continue to support the national EBRAINS Italian Community in the development, optimization, porting, and deployment of applications, tools and digital services.
The partnership
The project, that starts in January 2024, 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.
About EBRAINS
The EBRAINS research infrastructure, a key outcome and legacy of the EU-funded Human Brain Project (HBP), was officially launched in 2019. 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. The tools and services available here.
EBRAINS AISBL is an international non-profit association, headquartered in Brussels, Belgium. 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 and Switzerland.
More information on ebrains press release