The European Commission has accepted the EBRAINS 2.0 proposal submitted in response to the INFRASERV call, granting €38m for the further development of services of the EBRAINS research infrastructure.
The new round of funding will support EBRAINS 2.0 until 2026.
Over the next three years, the infrastructure will continue to develop tools and services to widely serve research communities in neurosciences, brain medicine, and brain-inspired technologies.
What is the project about?
The EBRAINS research infrastructure, a key outcome and legacy of the EU-funded Human Brain Project (HBP), was officially launched in 2019.
It’s an EU co-funded collaborative research platform designed to advance neuroscience and brain health and is organised around a central hub that coordinates a pan-European network of services delivered through currently 11 National Nodes: Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.
Developed as a legacy of the Human Brain Project, EBRAINS is a digital ecosystem where researchers, clinicians, and experts converge to explore the complexity of the brain at various scales and derive new solutions for brain medicine and technology.
The infrastructure offers an extensive range of brain data sets, a multilevel brain atlas, modelling and simulation tools, and access to high-performance computing resources and robotics and neuromorphic platforms to researchers.
The launch of EBRAINS 2.0
The new project, dubbed EBRAINS 2.0, will further the development and provision of the infrastructure’s research technologies to the scientific community.
It aims to establish a new standard for brain atlases, gather and connect multimodal neuroscientific and clinical data, and push forward the development of digital twin approaches.
The project involves 59 partner institutions from 16 European countries. It was selected for funding after evaluation by independent experts. It is coordinated by the EBRAINS AISBL, a non-profit organisation founded in Brussels during the Human Brain Project, and starts in January 2024.
“The grant agreement marks an important milestone for the EBRAINS research infrastructure,” stated Katrin Amunts, who became Joint Chief Executive Officer of the EBRAINS AISBL in September 2023 and led the writing of the successful EBRAINS 2.0 proposal.
“We look forward to further developing our tools and services, to share them with our colleagues and to empower the community to make progress in neuroscience.”
Philippe Vernier, Joint Chief Executive Officer of EBRAINS, added: “We are delighted to have been awarded the SERV grant. It is a recognition of the sustainable scientific value of the research infrastructure.”
