Dates: February 5 & 17, March 5, 17, & 31, 2021
BRAIN Connectivity Workshop Series website
The purpose of this series of workshops, co-hosted by The BRAIN Initiative and the Department of Energy Office of Science, is to bring together researchers with a broad array of expertise to discuss the state of the art in mapping complete neural circuits, the opportunities for advancing connectomics technologies, and the challenges that need to be addressed to generate comprehensive maps of brain connectivity – “wiring diagrams” spanning the entire mammalian brain. Comprehensive atlases of brain connectivity will dramatically enhance the capability of researchers to formulate and test models of how activity in brain circuits drives coordinated function and behavior, as well as accelerate the development of the next generation of circuit-based therapeutics. The construction of high-resolution anatomical maps of mammalian brains will require new innovations in high-throughput automated imaging, high-performance computing, and data science, including artificial intelligence and machine learning. This effort will require collaboration among scientists and engineers across many diverse disciplines and sectors to invent, refine, scale up, and democratize the new technologies and resources, as well as collaboration between the BRAIN Initiative, DOE, and other federal agencies and private partners, to achieve this ambitious goal. Recordings of the workshops are viewable via NIH VideoCast at the below links:
- Significance of mapping complete neural circuits (Workshop 1: Agenda PDF, 233 KB)
- Sample preparation in mammalian whole-brain connectomics (Workshop 2: Agenda PDF, 268 KB)
- Experimental modalities for whole-brain connectivity mapping (Workshop 3: Agenda PDF, 238 KB)
- Connectome generation and data pipelines (Workshop 4: Agenda PDF, 257 KB)
- Optimizing the use of connectomic data to drive data science and scientific discovery (Workshop 5: Agenda PDF, 261 KB)
A report summarizing the discussion across the workshop series(pdf, 1480 KB) (PDF, 1.98 MB) is available.