Prof. Katrin Amunts did a postdoctoral fellowship at the C. & O. Vogt Institute of Brain Research at Duesseldorf University, Germany. In 1999, she set up a new research unit for Brain Mapping at the Research Center Juelich, Germany. In 2004, she became professor for Structural-Functional Brain Mapping, and in 2008 a full professor at the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics at the RWTH Aachen University as well as director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1) at the Research Center Juelich. Since 2013, she is a full professor for Brain Research, director of the C. and O. Vogt Institute of Brain Research, Heinrich-Heine University Duesseldorf and director of the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), Research Center Juelich. Katrin Amunts is the programme speaker of the programme Decoding the Human Brain of the Helmholtz Association, Germany. Since 2017 Katrin Amunts is co-speaker of the graduate school Max-Planck School of Cognition and since 2018 she is a member of the International Advisory Council Healthy Brains for Healthy Lives, Canada.

Since 2016, she is the Scientific Research Director and Chair of the Science and Infrastructure Board (SIB) European Flagship, The Human Brain Project (HBP).

In order to better understand the organizational principles of the human brain, she and her team aim to integrate cyto-, receptorarchitectonic, genetic and functional as well as PLI-based maps into a multimodal atlas, which contributes to EBRAINS, the research infrastructure of the HBP. Central to her approach are the development and application of methods of high-performance computing to generate ultra-high resolution human brain models such as the BigBrain, and the Juelich-Brain, a cytoarchitectonic atlas reflecting variations in brain structure.

Sessions: Welcome & Introduction to HBP & EBRAINS | Closing Remarks by HBP & EBRAINS

Rimantas Benetis – professor, PhD, cardiac surgeon, Rector of the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences, Head of Department of Cardiothoracic and Vascular Surgery. The professor was a leader of the cardiac surgery team which completed the first heart transplantation in Kaunas and the first lung and heart-lung transplantation in the Baltic States. He received following awards: the Cross of the Officer of the Order for Merits to Lithuania, the Cross of the Officer of the Order of the Lithuanian Grand Duke Gediminas. Professor is a member of the Lithuanian Society of Thoracic and Cardiac Surgery, member of the European Association of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery (EACTS), member of the European Valve Repair Group (EVRG).

Session: Welcome by the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences

Dr Adomas Bunevičius is a neurosurgeon, and his research area is neuro-oncology. In addition to the conventional scientific projects on neuro-oncology patient clinical data analysis, he initiated a new approach of cancer patient monitoring using IT technologies.

Young Researchers Presentation: Digital phenotyping in neuro-oncology

Cancer is a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Increasing adoption of targeted therapies have significantly improved long-term prognosis of cancer patients thus underscoring the importance of continuous and automated monitoring of disease progression and treatment side effects of long-term cancer survivors. The COVID-19 pandemic has further underscored the importance of tele-health in cancer patient care. Cancer patient monitoring using passively acquired data streams from smartphones and/or wearable device is a promising methods allowing high-resolution continuous monitoring of cancer progression and treatment adverse events. Integration of digital phenotyping strategies with clinically relevant actively acquired data streams and advanced data analytics can open new avenues to optimized care of cancer patients.

Svenja Caspers studied medicine, business studies and economics. After finalizing her MD thesis on the microarchitecture of the human inferior parietal lobule and conducting her PhD on neural resources of decision making, she focused her postdoc phase at the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine of the Research Centre Jülich (Germany) on the structure-function relationship in human association cortices, using multimodal magnetic resonance imaging and postmortem microscopy techniques. In 2012, she became team leader for 1000BRAINS, a large population-based cohort study on variability of brain structure, function and connectivity of the aging brain in the Research Centre Jülich. Her research focus thus moved towards brain aging research in light of environmental and lifestyle influencing factors in large cohorts, using high-throughput analyses via high-performance computing facilities. Becoming an Associate Professor for Connectivity in the Human Brain at the University of Düsseldorf (Germany) as well as group leader of the Connectivity Group and Deputy Director in the Research Centre Jülich in 2015, she is now (since 2018) Full Professor for Anatomy and Director of the Institute for Anatomy I at the University of Düsseldorf, continuing her position in Jülich. Since 2020, she is holds the position as Vice Dean for Teaching and Study Quality at the Medical Faculty of the University Düsseldorf.

Panel Session I: Interindividual variability of brain phenotypes – towards population neuroimaging & brain models
The human brain as well as the respective cognitive abilities show a pronounced interindividual variability which are considerably evident during the aging process and thus in the older adult brain. Influences beyond the factor ‘age’ itself need to be considered when trying to understand this variability in brain structure, function and connectivity. These include genetic as well as lifestyle and environmental factors and their complex interplay. Since the effect of each single factor might be small, large population-based cohorts are needed to capture these individual influences. The talk will show some examples from a large cohort of older subjects of the Research Centre Jülich, the 1000BRAINS study, as well as the German National Cohort (NAKO). Examples will demonstrate the relevance and interplay of different influencing factors on brain structure, function and connectivity and will discuss the effects of data pooling as compared to large homogeneous studies. Current efforts within the HBP in terms of modelling population variability in aging and the usability of EBRAINS to interpret and integrate such data using the multilevel atlas will be exemplified.

Workshop: Deep characterization of brain-phenotype relations using the EBRAINS multilevel atlas

Olivier David graduated in physics at Ecole Normale Supérieure de Cachan, and obtained a PhD from Université Paris Sud in signal processing applied to human neurophysiology at CNRS / La Salpêtrière Hospital. He did a post-doc at University College London where he developed a highly cited method for inferring properties of neuronal populations underlying brain oscillations (Dynamic Causal Modelling for MEG/EEG). He is now Director of Research at Inserm, France. he has been based at Grenoble Institute of Neuroscience between 2005 and 2020, and recently moved to the Institute of Systems  Neuroscience, Marseille. The main topic of his current research is to understand the effects of brain stimulation on the organization of functional brain networks. He has published more than 150 articles in international peer-reviewed journals and integrated the Human Brain Project in 2018 on the Medical Informatics Platform. He is now the co-PI of the Human Intracerebral Platform and is also involved in the scientific workpackages 1 and 2.

Plenary session II: Functional tractography

Intracerebral electrical stimulation can be used during presurgical evaluations in patients with refractory focal epilepsies. The responses to such stimulations as recorded by stereoelectroencephalography provide very useful information about brain connectivity. In particular, it is the only modality to give some hints on axonal conduction delays and directionality of long range fibers. This talk will be about the latest results of the F-TRACT project (f-tract.eu) that gathered in international database of such responses to direct electrical stimulation, which leads to the development of a neurophysiological atlas of cortico-cortical connections. We will also discuss how these data integrate to the HBP atlas.

Chiara De Luca graduated in Physics in 2019. She is associated with the INFN APE laboratory in Roma for her research in the Human Brain Project and is now pursuing her PhD in Behavioural Neuroscience at La Sapienza University in Rome.

Young Researchers Presentation: Brain states and their cognitive features: experimental data and data-constrained simulations

Timo Dickscheid is heading the "Big Data Analytics" group at the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany. He graduated in Computer Science at the University of Koblenz in 2006, and earned his PhD in Computer Vision and Photogrammetry at the University of Bonn in 2011 under the supervision of Prof. Wolfgang Förstner. In 2010, he joined Forschungszentrum Jülich as a post-doc in the lab of Katrin Amunts to work on medical image registration and segmentation for histological brain sections. After accepting a position as the head of Information Technology at the German Federal Institute of Hydrology in Koblenz in 2012, Timo returned to Jülich in 2014. His research group focuses on biomedical image analysis and neuroinformatics methods for building high-resolution 3D models of the human brain, and constitutes a local pillar of the national artificial intelligence research network “Helmholtz AI”. In the Human Brain Project (HBP), Timo leads the EBRAINS atlas service category (SC2), which includes the development of brain reference atlases and the corresponding software interfaces for exploration, data integration and data analysis.

Workshop: EBRAINS data sharing and use of multilevel human brain atlases

Karin Grasenick graduated in Computer Science and Biomedical Engineering. Her thesis on innovative non-invasive techniques to measure stroke volume led to a growing interest in inter- and transdisciplinary research, diversity in research content and equal opportunities in science. She lectures, coaches and supports teams, universities and international projects in diversity and change management. In HBP, she actively supports the recognition of diversity as a success factor for research and innovation. Together with her team she provides tools and techniques for researchers accordingly. 

Career Chat: How to develop a brainy career

Viktor Jirsa is Director of the Inserm Institut de Neurosciences des Systèmes at Aix-Marseille-Université in Marseille, France. Dr. Jirsa received his PhD in 1996 in Theoretical Physics and Applied Mathematics and has since then contributed to the field of Theoretical Neuroscience, in particular through the development of large-scale brain network models based on realistic connectivity. His work has been foundational for network science in medicine with translations to clinical applications. Dr. Jirsa serves as scientific lead of the brain simulation platform The Virtual Brain (www.thevirtualbrain.org) and lead investigator in the Human Brain Project (https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/). Dr. Jirsa has been awarded several prizes for his research including the Grand Prix de Recherche en Provence (2018) and has published more than 160 scientific articles.

Moderator Round table: EBRAINS for next-generation brain medicine

Dr. rer. medic. Christiane Jockwitz obtained her M.Sc. in Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience (Neuropsychology) from Maastricht University, the Netherlands in 2011. Afterwards, she did her PhD at the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), Research Center Juelich, Germany on “Structure-Function Relationships in Resting-State-Networks of older adults”. Currently, Dr. Jockwitz is working as Post-Doc in the Connectivity group of the INM-1 (Research Centre Juelich) and Institute of Anatomy I, Heinrich-Heine-University & University Hospital Dusseldorf, Germany. In her research, Dr. Jockwitz investigates the structural and functional organization of the aging brain in relation to cognitive functions, especially during older ages. Dr. Jockwitz has expertise with population neuroimaging and is part of the study committee of the population-based cohort study 1000BRAINS investigating the inter-individual variability of the normal aging brain. In 2017, the Swiss National Science Foundation awarded her an International Short Visit at the University Research Priority Program “Dynamics of Healthy Aging” at the University of Zurich to cross-validate age-related changes in cognitive performance and brain structure in two large cohorts consisting of older adults.

Workshop: Deep characterization of brain-phenotype relations using the EBRAINS multilevel atlas

Alexander Kroner is a PhD student at the Department of Cognitive Neuroscience (Maastricht University) with a background in Artificial Intelligence (M.Sc. from Maastricht University) and Cognitive Science (B.Sc. from Osnabrück University). His research revolves around the use of deep neural networks as a model of visual processing and attentional mechanisms in the brain. In particular, he focuses on the development and analysis of convolutional architectures for the task of saliency prediction. Within the Human Brain Project, this work is embedded as part of a closed sensorimotor loop that links complex visual input to eye movements in a neurorobotic system.

Young Researchers Presentation: The role of low- and high-level features for visual saliency prediction

The study of eye movements allows researchers to investigate some of the mechanisms that guide the allocation of attention. When freely viewing natural images, observers do not randomly sample the scene but preferentially explore certain regions. However, the types of image features that attract fixations, and are hence more salient, have been a matter of debate. Early computational models leveraged low-level features inspired from biological insights, whereas current deep neural networks exploit the semanticity of high-level features to predict salient image regions. Understanding the contributions of both factors to eye movement patterns paves the way for exploring the neural mechanisms that give rise to this behavior.

Dr Jean-François Mangin is the director of Baobab, the methodological research unit of Neurospin, the ultra-high field neuroimaging center of the CEA. He is also the funding director of the CATI platform dedicated to multicenter neuroimaging (http://cati-neuroimaging.com), which has supported over 40 clinical studies across France and Europe. Relying on a growing network of about 100 harmonised imaging facilities, the platform monitors acquisitions and performs centralised image analysis from a wide portfolio. He has been co-leader of the Strategic Human Brain Data sub-project of the Human Brain Project.
His primary scientific interest for 30 years has been the study of the variability of the folding pattern of the human cerebral cortex. His team has developed several generations of dedicated systems, which have been distributed to the community through the BrainVISA platform (http://brainvisa.info/). He was awarded in 2020 one of the Artificial Intelligence Chairs from the French national AI program.

Plenary Session II: A new generation of integrated brain atlas and its potential for clinical research

The HBP atlas is bridging different worlds that use to be difficult to interface (post mortem imaging, in vivo imaging, intracranial recording…). Multimodal atlases and outstanding datasets that come from these different worlds have been aligned into the reference spaces used in clinical research. They provide a very rich knowledge set for interpreting and annotating clinical results. The HBP atlas provides also the resources required to feed simulation-engine used for instance to support the planning of epilepsy surgery. Post mortem atlases include cytoarchitectonic and neuroreceptor maps, and will be enriched with ultrahigh resolution connectivity maps. In vivo atlases include the largest atlases of the long and short fiber bundles, and an atlas of functional areas inferred from subjects contributing to over 30 fMRI sessions. Finally, intracranial recording of hundreds of European patients provide samples of the high resolution dynamics of the human brain.

Dr George Ogoh is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University. He has a background in Computer Information Systems and has obtained a PhD in Computing and Social Responsibility from De Montfort University. His research for the Human Brain Project (HBP) covers a wide range of ethics-related topics at the intersection of brain research and neurotechnology and include themes on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), responsible innovation, diversity and equality, data governance, and data protection.

Workshop: Aligning research and innovation with societal needs: ethics & dual use

Maja A. Puchades is a senior researcher at the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences, University of Oslo, Norway. She received her PhD in 2003, from Gothenburg University, Sweden, with a thesis focused on developing proteomic methods for studying biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease. After several post-doc periods working with different neurodegenerative disease models, she joined the Nesys laboratory, Univ. of Olso in 2015. The main research focus is development of software tools for analyses of rodent data in context of 3D reference atlases. In the Human brain project (HBP) and EBRAINS infrastructure, Puchades is deputy leader for the Brain atlas service and related tools and participate to the EBRAINS Curation team.

Workshop: EBRAINS data sharing and use of multilevel human brain atlas 

Petra Ritter heads the Brain Simulation Section at the Dept. of Neurology, Charité and Berlin Institute of Health. She is a full professor for Brain Simulation. Her research focus is on integrating neuroimaging and computational neuroscience to discover mechanisms of brain function and dysfunction. She has led local (Charité & BIH Virtual Research Environment^[1]), national (Bernstein Focus), European (VirtualBrainCloud; Co-design Project The Virtual Brain in the EU Flagship HBP SGA2) and international neuroiformatics consortia (co-lead The Virtual Brain platform with >30k software downloads), is a participant in the national research data infrastructure initiative (NFDI) NFDI4Health and a co-speaker in NFDI-Neuro and a member of the European Open Science Cloud Architecture working group. She holds an ERC Consolidator grant and is engaged in several large-scale software projects. In the €15Mill funded EU project Virtual Brain Cloud and its local partnering project Virtual Research Environment, Ritter and collaborators develop a reference architecture for cross-institutional managing and processing of radiologic imaging and associated data in compliance with GDPR. Ritter’s Brain Simulation Section is GOLD member of the International Neuroinformatics Coordination Facility (INCF). Petra Ritter studied medicine at the Charité University Medicine Berlin. She spent a large part of her clinical traineeships and practical year abroad: at the universities UCLA and UCSD in Los Angeles and San Diego, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and the Harvard Medical School in Boston.   In 2002, she received her license to practise medicine. In 2004, she completed her doctoral thesis at the Charité and in 2010 she received habilitation in Experimental Neurology.  After being Max Planck Minerva research group leader from 2011 to 2015, she assumed the lifetime position of BIH Johanna Quandt Professor for Brain Simulation at Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) and Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, one of Europe’s largest university hospitals.  Since 2017, she is Director of the Brain Simulation Section at Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin.

Plenary session I, Keynote lecture: The Virtual Brain Cloud: Integrating multi-scale data through computational modeling

The challenge in studying the brain as a complex adaptive system is that complexity arises from the interactions of structure and function at different spatiotemporal scales. Neuroimaging can provide exquisite measures of structure and function separately, but misses the fact that the brain complexity emerges from the intersection of the two. Here is where computational modelling of brain networks can help. Models that simulate different combinations of subordinate features of behaviour of a complex system that often can only be measured invasively (e.g. local population dynamics and long-range interactions) identify the combination of features that most likely give rise to emergent behaviour that often is observable noninvasively (e.g. EEG, MEG, fMRI) - and importantly those that are less likely. We can exploit the power of large-scale network models to integrate disparate neuroimaging data sources and evaluate the potential underlying biophysical network mechanisms. This approach is now feasible in a whole-brain simulation platform, TheVirtualBrain (TVB). TVB integrates empirical neuroimaging data from different modalities to construct biologically plausible computational models of brain network dynamics. TVB is a generative model wherein biophysical parameters for the level of cell population activity and anatomical connectivity are optimized/fitted so that they generate an individual’s observed data in humans, macaques or rodents. The inferences about brain dynamics, complexity, and the relation to cognition are thus made at the level of the biophysical features (e.g., balance of excitation and inhibition in a cell population) that generated the observed data, rather than particular features of the data (e.g. functional connectivity). For clinical research with The Virtual Brain, two research directions seem especially promising. One approach is to use brain network modelling in order to create a better understanding of the biological mechanisms underlying an illness, with the goal to design and develop better diagnostic and therapeutic tools. Another approach is to fit TVB models with empirical data in order to find parameters that can be used as health status indicators for diagnosis, in order to predict therapeutic outcomes – to decide between therapy alternatives or to guide surgical intervention specifically and individually for each patient. The TVB ecosystem is offered as a service on EBRAINS – providing users with infrastructure, tools and knowledge to support their simulations.

Prof. Arimantas Tamašauskas is director of the Neuroscience Institute and Professor and Chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences in Kausas, Lithuania. In 1986 he graduated from Medical School and received his PhD 1994 for the thesis "Neurosurgical management of patients with ruptured cerebral aneurysms in hospital population of Lithuania". He habilitated in 2001 with the thesis "Features of Surgical Management of the Intracranial Disorders in the Skull Base" at the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences. Until now Prof. Tamašauskas contributed to more than 200 scientific publications.

Session: Welcome by the Lithuanian University of Health Sciences

Julia Trattnig studied Roman Languages, Political Science and Gender Studies at the University of Vienna and at the University of Graz. In her master theses about gender roles in the colonial context of Indochina and about online hate speech against women, she was able to link her liberal arts degree and socio-scientific studies in an inter- and transdisciplinary way.

She completed several internships in the media sector (ORF, Kleine Zeitung) and at different NGOs in Vienna (Frauenhetz) and Graz (Anti-Discrimination Office Styria). She has been working for convelop since March 2020 and is able to use her background knowledge on gender, diversity, equality policy and content analysis to add further expertise to the team. As a scientific staff member, she fulfils diverse tasks such as research, reporting and structural organisation.

Workshop: Career Chat: How to develop a brainy career

Dr. Inga Ulnicane has more than ten years of international and interdisciplinary research, teaching and engagement experience in the field of science, technology and innovation policy and governance. She has published on topics such as international research collaboration, European integration in science and technology and the Grand societal challenges concept as well as undertaken commissioned studies for European Parliament and European Commission. Currently she is a Research Fellow at De Montfort University (Leicester, UK). She is part of the HBP Responsible Research and Innovation work package (WP9). She is Chair of the Human Brain Project’s Dual Use working group. Her current research topics include governance of Artificial Intelligence, dual use and research infrastructures. 

Workshop: Aligning research and innovation with societal needs: ethics & dual use