A five-year NIH R25 research education grant for a residential summer school on reanalysis of open neurophysiology data and AI methods for neural data, formerly NeuroDataReHack
The National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke has awarded CatalystNeuro a five-year R25 research education grant (R25NS149357) for the NeuroData AI Summer School. The school continues the program we have run as NeuroDataReHack every year since 2022, first at the Allen Institute, then as a satellite of the IBRO World Congress in Granada, and since 2024 at HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus, which hosts and sponsors it. Participants arrive with a question they want to answer from existing data, form teams around shared datasets on the DANDI Archive, take instruction in the mornings from the developers of NWB, DANDI, SpikeInterface, Pynapple, and other community tools, and spend most of the week on project work with faculty on hand.
The award funds a longer week with a substantially larger share of the curriculum devoted to AI methods for neural data, including foundation models, coding with large language models and agents, dimensionality reduction and neural decoding, and transfer learning across datasets. It also gives the program continuity: teaching materials accumulate instead of being rebuilt each spring, faculty can be invited further in advance, and we can follow what participants do after they leave, which is the measure that counts.