Human Brain Project (HBP)
Overview
The Human Brain Project was a 10-year EU FET Flagship initiative (2013–2023), one of the two largest scientific projects ever funded by the European Union. Its mission was to build a collaborative European research infrastructure for neuroscience, medicine, and computing. The HBP’s most significant legacy is EBRAINS — the open neuroscience research infrastructure it created.
Key Achievements and Legacy
EBRAINS Research Infrastructure
EBRAINS is the primary legacy of the HBP, a permanent open research infrastructure providing brain atlas and data sharing services, simulation and HPC for computational neuroscience, the openMINDS metadata framework, and Live Papers (interactive reproducible publications).
openMINDS
openMINDS is the HBP/EBRAINS metadata framework for standardising neuroscience research data and the required metadata schema for depositing data on EBRAINS.
UBERON Contributions
The HBP contributed significantly to the development and application of UBERON (cross-species anatomy ontology) for brain region annotation in atlases and data models, establishing it as the standard for linking brain structure names across species in computational models and data repositories.
Multi-Level Brain Atlas
The HBP created the Julich Brain Atlas, a cytoarchitectonic probabilistic atlas of the human brain at cellular resolution, integrated into EBRAINS and freely available. The atlas provides probability maps for 200+ brain areas and is linked to UBERON anatomy terms.
Neuromorphic Computing
The HBP built two neuromorphic computing platforms, SpiNNaker (Manchester) and BrainScaleS (Heidelberg), available via EBRAINS for energy-efficient neural simulation, relevant to computational neuroscience and AI hardware research.
FAIR Neuroscience Data Sharing
The HBP established FAIR data sharing practices in neuroscience at a European scale. It made BIDS and NWB adoption a requirement for HBP data, drove the creation of EBRAINS data sharing workflows, and contributed to INCF standards governance.
Timeline
- 2013: HBP launched; 135 partner institutions; Chris Markram (EPFL) as director
- 2015: Major restructuring following open letter from 800+ neuroscientists criticising original plan; focus shifted to infrastructure
- 2016–2020: Infrastructure consolidation; EBRAINS pilot services; atlas development
- 2020: EBRAINS officially launched as successor infrastructure
- 2023: HBP project concluded; EBRAINS continues as independent ERIC candidate
Connections
Resources
- https://www.humanbrainproject.eu
- https://ebrains.eu (EBRAINS — HBP’s primary legacy)
- https://julich-brain-atlas.fz-juelich.de (Julich Brain Atlas)
- https://openminds.ebrains.eu (openMINDS metadata framework)