Brussels, 30 June, 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) [ESFRI press release]. 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.”

For Pawel Swieboda, CEO of EBRAINS and Director General of the Human Brain Project, “the inclusion of EBRAINS into the ESFRI Roadmap 2021 is a major achievement and a true recognition of the value EBRAINS brings to the European scientific community. This is the culmination of many years of very high-level research and development efforts of the Human Brain Project teams and I would like to thank them for their dedication and commitment. EBRAINS is an infrastructure at the service of the broader science community, and we look forward to having more and more researchers make the best use of it. We’re also eager to develop new collaborations and partnerships with innovative brain research initiatives or consortia supported by national and European funding.”

André Syrota, Chair of the Board of Directors of EBRAINS, commented: “We are very happy with this important milestone achieved by EBRAINS and I am personally very glad that France could play a leading role in the application process.  Better understanding of the brain is of fundamental importance in many diverse domains ranging from tackling brain disorders to developing artificial intelligence.  Having cutting-edge data and tools to help decode the brain in an open research infrastructure like EBRAINS will certainly be instrumental in enabling innovation and scientific progress.”

Media contact

Peter Zekert
Tel.: +49 2461 61 96860
press@humanbrainproject.eu

Further information:
https://ebrains.eu
https://www.humanbrainproject.eu

ABOUT THE HUMAN BRAIN PROJECT

The Human Brain Project (HBP) is the largest brain science project in Europe and stands among the biggest research projects ever funded by the European Union. It is one of the three FET Flagship Projects of the EU. At the interface of neuroscience and information technology, the HBP investigates the brain and its diseases with the help of highly advanced methods from computing, neuroinformatics and artificial intelligence, and drives innovation in fields like brain-inspired computing and neurorobotics.

ABOUT EBRAINS

EBRAINS is a new digital research infrastructure, created by the EU-funded Human Brain Project, to foster brain-related research and to help translate the latest scientific discoveries into innovation in medicine and industry, for the benefit of patients and society.

It draws on cutting-edge neuroscience and offers an extensive range of brain data sets, a multilevel brain atlas, modelling and simulation tools, easy access to high-performance computing resources and to robotics and neuromorphic platforms.