The European Commission has signed a grant agreement to fund EBRAINS with €38 million until 2026. Over the next three years, the research infrastructure – which includes the Politecnico di Milano as one of its partners – will continue to develop tools and services to widely serve research communities in neurosciences, brain medicine, and brain-inspired technologies.

EBRAINS (European Brain Research Infrastructures) is an EU co-funded collaborative research platform designed to advance neuroscience and brain health. 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 to derive therefrom new solutions for brain medicine and technology. The EBRAINS scientific director at the Politecnico di Milano is Prof. Alessandra Pedrocchi from the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering.

The new EBRAINS 2.0 project 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 overarching goal is to deepen the understanding of brain structure and function, leading to advancements in brain medicine, technology, and computing.

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 started in January 2024.