Three exciting Open Science initiatives will receive critical support thanks to The Neuro - Irv and Helga Cooper Foundation Open Science Prizes. The recipients of the 2024 awards have advanced neuroscience by improving inclusivity and access to neuroimaging and genetics data.
International Main Prize, The Global Parkinson’s Genetics Program (GP2)
The Global Parkinson’s Genetics Program (GP2) is geared toward creating a worldwide collaborative effort to dramatically accelerate identification of genetic contributors to disease and establishing a research network to leverage this understanding to investigate, diagnose, and treat Parkinson’s disease across the globe. GP2 researchers are generating dense genetic data in more than 150,000 participants. They generate whole-genome sequence data from more than 10,000 individuals to determine the genetic cause in monogenic cases and generate critical reference datasets. They are also using long-read DNA sequencing to support the analysis of structural and repeat variability that is relatively resistant to interrogation using traditional genome sequencing methods.
Since beginning in 2019, GP2 has created a global research community with over 145 cohorts from 59 unique countries. They have genotyped over 35,000 samples from patients and control participants, and released data from 25,000 individuals to the scientific community. To date, GP2 has received almost 1000 requests from the scientific community to access the genetic data.
International Trainee Prize, Mohamed Abdelhack, Krembil Centre for Neuroinformatics, CAMH
The prize was awarded for Abdelhack’s long-standing commitment to sharing and disseminating cutting-edge knowledge in computational neuroscience among underrepresented trainee communities in the Global South, through his substantial involvement as mentor in Neuromatch Academy and the Imbizo Computational Neuroscience Summer School, and as the founder of Arabs in Neuroscience. He further demonstrated a dedication to Open Science throughout his research work, leading to the release of open software pipelines to process big data from 30,000 participants from the UK Biobank and the Human Connectome Project.
Arabs in Neuroscience is a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing open neuroscience education in Africa and the Arabic-speaking-world. The initiative has created the first computational neuroscience educational material in Arabic, all made freely available online on Github and YouTube, where videos have racked up over 6000 views. Their workshops and summer school cultivate a dynamic community of more than 50 volunteers, have trained over 300 students, and have drawn over 1,000 applicants from more than 18 countries.
Canadian Trainee Prize, Michelle Wang, The Neuro, Â鶹AV
The prize was awarded for Michele Wangs’ involvement in the neuroimaging Open Science community and leading role in the development of Nipoppy, an open software infrastructure for processing large neuroimaging data.
Nipoppy is a framework that specifies how to organize, combine, and process neuroimaging-clinical datasets to ensure reproducibility. It builds upon existing efforts and aims to facilitate the adoption of good practices by providing user-friendly and flexible software tools. Nipoppy’s focus on flexibility and decentralization of data processing makes it unique and valuable in the current neuroimaging software ecosystem. In just a few years, Nipoppy has been adopted by several research groups in Canada and internationally. Nipoppy has notably been used to process data from the Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative and the Quebec Parkinson Network using existing open-source pipelines and with all parameters documented for reproducibility. This framework is expected to impact the neuroimaging research community significantly.
