“EBRAINS is key in the European landscape for brain health” - EBRAINS Summit 2025 opens in Brussels

On Tuesday December 9 2025, the EBRAINS Summit opened with a Public Day for Brain Research and Innovation in Brussels. EBRAINS is Europe’s digital research infrastructure for brain research. This year's EBRAINS Summit partners with the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility (INCF) to support the shared mission of both organisations. The event brings together hundreds of neuroscientists, policymakers, technologists and innovators to explore the future of brain research and its impact on society.

Welcome addresses were given by Kilian Gross, Director for Enabling and Emerging Technologies at the European Commission's DG CNECT, Anders Dam Jensen, Executive Director European High Performance Computing Joint Undertaking, and Joint CEOs of the EBRAINS AISBL Katrin Amunts and Philippe Vernier. Brain researcher Rafael Yuste from Columbia University then delivered the first scientific keynote, starting off a rich three-day programme with over 70 speakers. 

During his welcoming speech, Kilian Gross reflected on the development of the EBRAINS infrastructure from the Flagship Human Brain Project (2013-2023). “From the beginning, your approach was a highly visionary one,” said Gross. “The EBRAINS Summit 2025 represents a new chapter.” The director highlighted that EBRAINS is becoming the reference infrastructure for all in neuroscience who are working with large data sets. He stressed that the digital technologies that EBRAINS offers for neuroscience are fundamental, and that the EBRAINS community is well positioned to contribute to Europe's AI factories in the medical applications area. Gross believes that EBRAINS will be “an architect of an era of brain-inspired innovation that blurs the boundaries of biology, AI, and medicine.” 

Anders Dam Jensen presented Europe's supercomputing advances through the HPC Joint Undertaking, a major initiative for High Performance Computing that this year brought the first European Exascale system JUPITER online in Jülich, Germany. To illustrate the immense power of the supercomputer he said: “Let’s assume that every human on Earth is able to do a high-precision calculation every second. Then it would take all of the world population four years to do what JUPITER does in a second.” The first neuroscience application on JUPITER uses EBRAINS’ high-quality data and atlasing tools to show the scalability of AI-powered brain mapping.

Katrin Amunts, Joint CEO of the EBRAINS AISBL, welcomed the over 500 registrants from 58 countries. “Please use the opportunity of the summit to discover EBRAINS,” Amunts said. The brain researcher highlighted the advances made in the last two years since the beginning of the EBRAINS 2.0 project: from the integration of Glia cells in neural simulation models, to new research on brain cancer through improved views of the brain's connectivity and widely used AI training data sets on EBRAINS, and newly published brain-derived AI algorithms. “Advanced neuroscience is going hand-in-hand with technological realisations and new patents,” said Amunts. Similarly, Amunts highlighted scientific advances by researchers who are not themselves part of any of the EBRAINS projects but use the infrastructure for their work. She also highlighted work for patients, like the Virtual Brain Twin project on EBRAINS.

“EBRAINS is key in the European landscape for brain health,” stressed Philippe Vernier. The French neuroscientist, who co-leads the EBRAINS AISBL, also emphasised the many mechanisms through which users shape the development of the infrastructure. “EBRAINS is made by the community and for the community,” said Vernier, and, addressing the audience: ”EBRAINS is yours.”

Rafael Yuste from Columbia University in New York, one of the initiators of the US Brain Initiative and currently spearheading the Spanish Neurotechnology Initiative, closed the first session with a broad view on the development of brain research and the impact of neurotechnology.