Elisabeth Bik, PhD is a Dutch-American microbiologist who has worked for 15 years at Stanford University and 2 years in industry. Since 2019, she is a science integrity volunteer and consultant who scans the biomedical literature for images or other data of concern. She has found over 8,000 scientific papers, and her work resulted in over 1,200 retractions and another 1,000 corrections. For her work in science communication and exposing research misconduct, she received the 2021 John Maddox Prize.

Dr. Bik will be the keynote speaker for a special guest session.

Contributing to the development of a highly detailed and openly accessible human brain atlas at cellular resolution, Dr. Dickscheid’s research interests are at the intersection of Computer Vision, Big Data Analytics, and Neuroinformatics. Dr. Dicksheid’s research group in Jülich investigates methods for extracting information from microscopic images, and reconstructing 3D brain models at the level of individual cells and nerve fibers. His team contributes to the development of EBRAINS through the Human Brain Project by building the technology for a highly detailed human brain atlas together with partners in different European research institutions.

Dr. Dickscheid will be the keynote speaker for Session 1: FAIR neuroscience.

I am interested in developing technologies to generate, manage, visualize, analyze, and understand massive-scale structure and function data related to brains, especially human brains. I am using approaches of Big Data and Machine Intelligence to study problems related to these topics. I am all for Open Science. I was with the Allen Institute for Brain Science (Seattle), and Janelia Research Campus, HHMI (Ashburn) in the last 15 years. I am also an affiliate/adjunct Professor with the University of Washington (USA) and the University of Georgia (USA), etc. Prior to 2006, I did research at Berkeley and Johns Hopkins, etc. I am an elected Fellow of AIMBE and IEEE. We develop and use many machine learning, artificial intelligence, data mining, and imaging methods to handle the very complex and very large scale brain data, gene expression data, and many other types of data. We welcome collaborations especially the large scale data challenges. My group has been a world-leader in massive scale multi-dimensional imaging and visualization, very large scale brain mapping, neuron- and cell-phenotyping, feature extraction and Bayesian inferencing for general applications, as demonstrated in a number of high-profile, recognized publications and widely-used open-source software packages. .

Dr. Peng will be the keynote speaker for Session 2: Technologies for large-scale computation and team science.

Danilo Bzdok is a medical doctor and computer scientist with a dual background in systems neuroscience and machine learning algorithms. After training at RWTH Aachen University (Germany), Université de Lausanne (Switzerland), and Harvard Medical School (USA), he completed one Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience (Research Center Juelich, Germany) and one Ph.D. in computer science in machine learning statistics at INRIA Saclay and Neurospin (France). Danilo currently serves as Associate Professor at McGill's Faculty of Medicine and as Canada CIFAR AI Chair at Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, Montreal, Canada, including cross-appointments at the McConnell Brain Imaging Center, Montreal Neurological Institute, Ludmer Centre for Neuroinformatics and Mental Health, and the School of Computer Science at McGill University. His interdisciplinary research activity centers on narrowing knowledge gaps in the brain basis of human-defining types of thinking, with a special focus on the higher association cortex in health and disease.

Dr. Bzdok will be the keynote speaker for Session 3: Applications of AI to Neuroscience research.

Viktor Jirsa is a German physicist and neuroscientist, director of research at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), director of the Institut de Neuroscience des Systèmes (INS UMR1106) and co-director of the Fédération Hospitalo-Universitaire (FHU) EPINEXT "Epilepsy and Disorders of Neuronal Excitability" in Marseille, France. He is workpackage leader in the Epinov project, funded in the context of the RHU3 call and coordinated by Fabrice Bartolomei. Since the late 1990s, Jirsa has made important contributions to the understanding of the link between brain function and network dynamics. He has pioneered the use of biologically realistic connectivity in brain network models of the human and rodent. Applications of this large-scale modeling approach are in resting state activity, epilepsy and aging. Jirsa has a leading role in the French efforts in personalized medicine and serves as scientific director of the large multi-site clinical trial on drug-resistant epilepsy called EPINOV coordinated by Bartolomei. This project represents one of the first translational applications of computational neuroscience in personalized medicine. Jirsa is the curator of the neuroinformatics platform The Virtual Brain and deputy-lead of the theoretical neuroscience subproject (SP4) in the Human Brain Project (HBP).

Dr. Jirsa will be the keynote speaker for Session 4: Closing the discovery loop and digital twins.

I am the Founder of CatalystNeuro, a consulting and software development company that facilitates collaboration in neuroscience. We believe that the future of neuroscience will be driven by collaboration between labs. Our mission is to develop channels of communication and distribution of resources between labs to enable exponential growth and innovation. We are at the forefront of this effort, shaping the way data, analysis and visualization tools are standardized and shared across the international community of systems neuroscientists. We ensure that these tools accelerate scientific discovery by working in parallel with neuroscientists and work with them to enhance the tools they already use. .

Ben Dichter will be the lead for the Training 1 session: Driving collaboration in neurophysiology with NWB and DANDI

Dr. Pestilli holds a Ph.D. from New York University and a B.A. from the University of Rome La Sapienza. He completed postdoctoral training at Columbia University and Stanford University and earned tenure at Indiana University, Bloomington. His research spans multiple disciplines, including Psychology, Computer Science, Software Engineering, and Neuroscience. Dr. Pestilli serves as Chair of the Infrastructure Committee of the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility and is the past Chair of the International Brain Initiative Data Standards and Sharing Working Group. At The University of Texas, he teaches Data Science and Cognitive Neuroscience and has developed a Study Abroad Program in Cognitive Neuroscience in Geneva, Switzerland. In addition to teaching at UT Austin, Dr. Pestilli has lectured across the United States, including in Alabama, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Illinois, New Jersey, and California, as well as internationally in Japan, Korea, Italy, France, the U.K., Nigeria, South Africa, the Netherlands, Canada, and Switzerland. Dr. Pestilli is the Founder and Director of brainlife.io, a public platform for data management, standardization, and analysis. He also leads several international projects, including the Brain Research International Data Governance & Exchange (BRIDGE; braindatagovernance.org), which focuses on advancing data governance and sharing across countries. The Advanced Computational Neuroscience Network promotes transdisciplinary training in Neuroscience, Psychology, Engineering, and Computer Science, while the Brain Imaging Data Structure (BIDS) Connectivity Project is developing standards for brain connectivity studies. He has also led the development of (ezBIDS, a significant tool for brain imaging data standardization, impacting multiple universities and currently being used by centers at the U.S. National Institutes of Health. Dr. Pestilli is co-Director of the Data Management and Informatics Core for the NIH's BRAIN CONNECTS Center for Mesoscale Connectivity focussed on developing data and models to map the human brain connections. .

Dr. Pestilli will be the lead for the Training 2 session: Introduction to reproducible neuroimaging data processing and analysis

Dimitri Yatsenko is the Founder and CEO of DataJoint, the operating platform for experimental science. Supported by DARPA and NIH, DataJoint gives research a robust, reproducible foundation by automating data processing, quality control, and governance for neuroscience and AI projects across the research spectrum, from individual labs to large multi-institutional consortia. Dimitri launched DataJoint as open-source software during his time at Baylor College of Medicine, where it was instrumental in managing data operations for the IARPA MICrONS project, which produced a detailed wiring diagram and functional characterization of a cubic millimeter of mouse cortex. DataJoint continues to innovate in data operations and publishing, supporting next-generation experiments that integrate online analysis and machine learning to accelerate discovery. .

Dimitri is a leading expert in scientific data operations. With a strong background in startups and the medical device industry, Dimitri is deeply committed to ensuring data quality, integrity, and operational efficiency. He is the inventor of the Computational Database, a new database model that makes it possible to design and implement reproducible computational pipelines. He also chairs the INCF Industry Advisory Council, which fosters collaboration between academic and industry technology providers to advance data operations technologies.