Building Bridges between large-scale brain initiatives

Jean-Baptiste (JB) Poline is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill; the co-Chair of the NeuroHub and Chair of the Technical Steering Committee for the Canadian Open Neuroscience Platform (CONP) at the Montreal Neurological Institute & Hospital (the NEURO); and a Primary Investigator at the Ludmer Centre for Neuroinformatics & Mental Health. Among its early pioneers, Poline is a leading researcher in the fields of fMRI, imaging genetics research, and the neuroinformatics technologies that make a big-data approach to neuroscience possible. Through his research, he has developed several novel data-analysis techniques in statistical modeling and inference for functional brain imaging (fMRI, PET) with applications to large imaging genetic datasets. He also co-developed the most widely-used fMRI software to date: Statistical Parametric Mapping (SPM). Ongoing innovations in genome-wide association studies and next-generation sequencing have helped identify some of the genetic factors underlying both neurological and mental disorders. Poline's research in brain imaging methods, specifically fMRI, has advanced this research by providing unique ways to explore the biological consequences of molecular changes induced by genetic variants on brain development—the effects of genetic variations on brain structure, function, and connectivity.

Maryann Martone is professor emerita at the University of California, San Diego and maintains an active laboratory, the FAIR Data Informatics Lab. She started her career as a neuroanatomist, specializing in light and electron microscopy, but her main research for the past 20 years focused on informatics for neuroscience, i.e., neuroinformatics. She led the Neuroscience Information Framework, a national project to establish a uniform resource description framework for neuroscience, and the NIDDK Information Network (dkNET), a portal for connecting researchers in digestive, kidney and metabolic disease to data, tools and materials. Martone is past president of FORCE11, an organization dedicated to advancing scholarly communication and e-scholarship, and she served as editor-in-chief of Brain and Behavior for five years. She completed two years as chair of the Council on Training, Science and Infrastructure for the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility and is now chair of the Governing Board. Since retiring, she served as director of biological sciences for Hypothesis, a technology nonprofit organization developing an open annotation layer for the web, from 2015 to 2018. She also founded SciCrunch, a technology startup based on technologies developed by the Neuroscience Information Framework and dkNET. Her current projects include dkNET, the Open Data Commons for Spinal Cord Injury, the Open Data Commons for Traumatic Brain Injury, the PRE Clinical Interagency Research ResourCE for TBI (PRECISE), Stimulating Peripheral Activity to Relieve Conditions (SPARC), Re-JOIN HEAL and ReproNim. Martone received a B.A. in biological psychology and ancient Greek from Wellesley College in Massachusetts and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from the University of California, San Diego.

Prof. Jan Bjaalie is Chief Data and Knowledge Officer at the EBRAINS AISBL and leader of the Data Services of the EBRAINS Research Infrastructure. Since 2023, he is Dean of Research and Innovation at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Oslo. He is a professor of anatomy and neuroscience at the Institute of Basic Medical Science and Head of the Norwegian Neuroinformatics Node. His previous roles include Head of the Institute of Basic Medical Sciences at the University of Oslo (2009-2016), founding Executive Director of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) at Karolinska Institute (2006-2008), Chair of the INCF Governing Board (2013-2016), and Co-Chair of the International Brain Initiative (2019-2020). Within the EU flagship Human Brain Project, he was the Neuroinformatics Platform Leader (2017–2020) and Infrastructure Director (2018–2022). His research group has focused on sensory map transformations, wiring patterns in the brain, and developing data systems for organising and managing neuroscience research data using next-generation digital brain atlases. Jan Bjaalie is the Chief Editor of Frontiers in Neuroinformatics and former Section Editor for Brain Structure and Function.