July 1, 2021 — EBRAINS, the digital pan-European research infrastructure developed by the EU-funded Flagship Human Brain Project, announces that it has been included in the 2021 Roadmap of the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI). France has served as the Lead Country for the EBRAINS application.

This marks an important milestone for EBRAINS and a recognition of the sustainable scientific value of the research infrastructure designed by the Human Brain Project teams. EBRAINS’ mission is to be a major enabler to advance brain research covering different areas such as neuroscience, brain health and brain-inspired technology. EBRAINS aims to contribute to significant scientific progress and innovation for the benefit of patients, industry and society as whole.

Science infrastructures included into the ESFRI Roadmap go through a thorough evaluation and selection procedure, taking both scientific excellence and implementation rigor into account.

ESFRI’s mission is to develop the scientific integration of Europe, to strengthen its international outreach, and to provide Europe with the most up-to-date Research Infrastructures, responding to the rapidly evolving Science frontiers, also advancing the knowledge-based technologies and their extended use. One of the core objectives of ESFRI is to ensure that excellent scientists have access to Europe’s best research infrastructures irrespective of borders.

The EBRAINS open research infrastructure provides the scientific community with extensive high-quality data sets, atlases, modelling, computing and simulation tools, as well as access to the European High-Performance Computer network, allowing state-of-the-art brain research. It is the result of the work of dozens of multidisciplinary teams from more than 100 European academic institutions who have worked together and shared cutting-edge expertise during the 10-year long Human Brain Project, which will continue to further develop EBRAINS until 2023.

EBRAINS will be a true pan-European infrastructure, organized around a central hub based in Brussels and national nodes spread across Europe and providing the various RI services and tools. Such a distributed and networked organisation will enable the RI to continue to evolve, with researchers and users sharing know-how and co-developing new services along the way to continuously better serve the needs of the scientific community.

“We are delighted by this recognition of our work and proud to contribute a truly novel platform to the European Research Landscape”, says Prof. Katrin Amunts, the Scientific Research Director of the Human Brain Project. “EBRAINS was created to establish a new paradigm of neuroscience that is highly integrated with technology and computing. This is a core goal of the Human Brain Project. Only the great work of so many colleagues all over Europe made it possible. Together we continue to provide the community with more and more powerful tools to accelerate research.”

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Source: Human Brain Project